The Customer
An engineer from a social media company has been purchasing AMD Threadripper™ PRO-based workstations from us for the past year. These powerful computers are used to perform simulation exercises and require high CPU and GPU performance.
The Challenge
When this customer first approached us, the storage requirements for his project were unknown. It was difficult to predict how much capacity would be needed to store the source data and results, especially since some of the simulations were new. He knew his storage needs would increase in the new workstations, but by how much?
As he took delivery of the systems and began to run various simulation projects, the local drives were filling up quickly. Before reaching capacity, he reached out to us at Puget Systems for advice on adding more storage.
The Solution
Our team considered his needs:
- To scale storage well beyond what was included in each workstation
- Making that storage available across multiple computers in use today, as well as future additions
We determined that a stand-alone storage solution would both meet his needs today and allow him to scale to greater capacity in the future. Since the workstations are in an office environment rather than a data center, we wanted to avoid rack-mounted servers. Given that combination of factors, the Synology DiskStation DS3622xs+ was a perfect fit.
This network-attached storage (NAS) system supports up to twelve 3.5-inch hard disk drives (HDDs) or 2.5-inch solid-state drives (SSDs), as well as a variety of RAID modes for redundancy and increased performance. For this application, we advised SSDs for fast read and write speeds. A full complement of twelve 7TB SATA SSDs gives this box up to 84TB of capacity, though with redundancy, that will likely end up around 70TB of usable space.
The DS3622xs+ also features built-in 1 GbE and 10 GbE RJ45 ports. To avoid a network bottleneck, and match their existing infrastructure, we suggested adding a dual 25GbE SFP28 network adapter as well.
While he hasn’t been able to put the DiskStation through its paces yet, our customer is happy with its size and capacity. It will allow his team to offload finished projects, while still retaining easy access to them. In the end, they will be able to run more simulations with less downtime and make better use of their Puget Systems workstations.
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