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First, determine whether an application or workflow has a unique or unbalanced dataset, determine its core characteristics. For example, does it include any of the following?
Next, determine how the application uses the stored data. For example, does it involve:
If the application or workload is latency-sensitive, are there expected timeouts for data requests built into it and can they be tuned? Are there other external applications from this application that might cause latency problems, such as FindFirstFile or FindNextFile crawls to do repetitive work that is not well-suited to NAS use and needs further investigation?
If an application can benefit from caching, how much of the unique dataset will be read once and then reread and over what periods of time (hourly, daily, weekly, and so on.) This can help in appropriately sizing a cluster’s L2 and L3 cache requirements.