vSAN is the recommended storage for VMs that serve as the Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster control plane nodes and worker nodes. vSAN automatically creates a default Storage Class through the vSAN Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver. When cnvrg.io is deployed, vSAN is used for pods storage and Docker images. cnvrg.io application data is stored as persistent volumes in vSAN. Also, datasets imported to cnvrg.io are also hosted on vSAN.

We recommend PowerScale storage for data lake storage, that is, storing data that are required for neural network training. PowerScale storage can also be used for NFS caching for datasets. Local NFS cache can save time when working with large datasets pulled from an external object-storage. The data is saved to an NFS server accessible to the Kubernetes cluster." 

The following figure illustrates the storage configuration for this validated design: 

Figure 5.   cnvrg.io storage configuration with vSAN and PowerScale