Cloud Storage Infrastructure: Selection Considerations

Today, the predictive and competitive value of being able to rapidly draw information from Big Data into critical decisions and explorations cannot be overstated, just as the cost of NOT being able to manage key information is increasing.  In this blog post, we offer a summary of the elements RAID, Inc. recommends considering when upgrading hpc infrastructures.

Purpose Built HPC Infrastructure vs. Private Cloud

Building HPC infrastructure, whether purpose-built or a more general private cloud model, may appear to be more costly for the business due to high initial capital equipment and software costs. On the other hand, public cloud resources may seem attractive financially, but can they fit your data security and performance requirements and still meet your needs?

Short term “easy” solutions for storage infrastructure can quickly become ‘too small’ and limit required operations if not built to scale and grow, or lock you into a single vendor’s product line. For these reasons, understanding and choosing from the best and latest technology guided by current expertise is a mandate. There is a big advantage to exploring purchasing strategies with a full-service partner who can explain and contrast multiple best-of-breed solutions to help you find the right fit for your needs.

Strategic Considerations for HPC Infrastructure Maintenance and Growth

Scalable: A specialized High Performance System support firm can provide expertise to design a customizable compute or storage architecture matched to a customer’s needs, and provide ongoing support and strategic consulting. Specialists can avoid over-building by designing scalable architectures, helping you to deploy the most advantageous high performance computing and storage technologies to your business.

Vendor Agnostic: The value of having an agnostic vendor with real HPC expertise can help alleviate the risk of buying ‘the wrong thing’ – anything which does not meet your true requirements, cannot scale in bandwidth or capacity, or is not able to smoothly transition to future technology. You need an IT environment that allows your talented staff to focus on business or research, not administering your IT environment.

If you are considering a move toward a more flexible, scalable architecture, use the 20+ years of experience we’ve developed in building custom hpc solutions for the world’s leading research, government, and corporate organizations.