HPCwire: As Linux clusters and HPC infrastructures become more mainstream and turnkey, it stands to reason that so too would the storage systems that support them. But until now, IT administrators have been burdened with conventional storage technologies that require quite a bit of customization before they can be effectively applied in these environments. Sure, a vendor targeting the HPC marketplace may dress up a parallel file system solution, a SAN storage product or NAS and call it a storage grid. But this designation, in and of itself, does not render that technology capable of meeting HPC performance, accessibility, capacity and availability requirements. Simply put, an HPC environment demands far more interoperability than is possible with a parallel file system, far more capacity than is possible with NAS and much greater data accessibility and collaborative possibilities than are possible with SAN storage. What it comes down to is this: Meeting HPC storage requirements requires an entirely new approach to storage, an approach that picks up where conventional technologies leave off and that is designed, from the ground up, to closely map its functionalities to those of an HPC environment.

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