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Scenario 1: Quota management
A university wants to give its students and groups a fixed amount of storage to control and keep storage growth in check. The storage administrator wants to know how much each student is consuming and limit storage use. To accomplish this, the storage administrator:
Scenario 2: Thin provisioning and scale-out
A company in the media and entertainment industry wants to overprovision storage and only add capacity when needed. The company buys two 200 TB of capacity for its cluster and allocates 500 GB to each of 1,000 users—effectively thin provisioning 500 TB. To enable this, the storage administrator:
Scenario 3: HPC compute farm constraining
A semiconductor company uses a large HPC compute cluster for parts of their EDA workflow, and it wants to guard against runaway jobs for consuming massive amounts of storage. The company runs heavy computation jobs from a large compute farm against a “scratch space” directory, housed on an S-node tier on their cluster, and garbage collection is run at midnight.
Throughout the workday, storage administrators have difficulty tracking storage utilization. Occasionally, jobs from the compute farm run amok, tying up large swathes of fast, expensive storage resources and capacity. To help prevent this, the storage administrator: