Cluster-as-a-Service - Shared storage

This article describes how to deploy and use shared storage clusters using JASMIN Cluster-as-a-Service (CaaS).

Introduction

CaaS provides shared storage clusters that can be mounted on multiple nodes to provide common storage across all those nodes.

These storage clusters are not intended to be directly consumed by users, but are taken as cluster configuration options by other clusters. In particular, Slurm clusters take a shared storage cluster as a configuration option - the shared storage is mounted on each cluster node for user home directories.

NFS

Network File System (NFS) is a protocol for accessing remote network-attached storage. NFS is also used to refer to the implementation of the protocol in the Linux kernel.

A CaaS NFS shared storage cluster provides a simple NFS server. A volume is attached of the specified size, formatted as an XFS filesystem, mounted at /srv and exported with no authentication.

NFS servers do not get an external IP, and so are only accessible from the tenancy's internal network.

Cluster configuration

The following variables are available to configure an NFS cluster: