Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Protocols > PowerScale: Home Directory Storage Solutions for NFS and SMB Environments > Total vs. active user connections
Storage workloads for home-directory file services tend to be driven more by the number of active user connections rather than the number of connections overall. Even an organization with over a thousand users with home directories on a PowerScale storage cluster may not require a high level of sustained throughput to the cluster if only a hundred or so of those user connections are in active use at any given time.
The critical factor for ensuring that a PowerScale storage cluster support an organization’s required performance targets, therefore, is a clear understanding of the specific end user access patterns: how many users a PowerScale storage cluster will need to support, what percentage of those connections can be expected to be active at any one moment, and what volume and type of workload those active connections will be carrying.
Once these factors have been successfully quantified, a suitable storage cluster configuration can be determined that will satisfy the appropriate performance requirements for the given workload type and volume.