What is NFS Shared Storage in the Cloud?

• Exploring the Benefits of NFS Shared Storage
• Cloud Providers’ NFS Shared Storage Services
• Five Considerations for NFS Shared Storage in the Cloud
• The Role of NFS Shared Storage in EDA Workloads

In general, cloud storage benefits are similar to on-premises deployments. Data management is simpler, faster, more efficient, and more scalable. Additionally, some cloud storage solutions enable organizations to implement high availability and disaster recovery strategies.

For NFS shared storage, the benefits include:

• Clients can access the same files on remote hosts as if they were local files.
• Using shared applications reduces storage costs and eliminates the need for local disk space.
• Data remains up-to-date and reliable since all users can access the same files.
• All users have visibility into the file system.
• Customers canrun mixed technology from multiple vendors and use interoperable components in heterogeneous environments.
• Data centralization reduces system administration overhead.

Cloud providers’ products support NFS shared storage, such as:

• Amazon EFS supports NFS shared storage for Linux applications that can run on AWS compute instances. There are two service levels available: standard and infrequent access, with automated tiering to place files at the best level for their usage. Access to files is parallelized to achieve "high levels" of throughput and input/output performance.
• Microsoft Azure Files provides fully managed shared storage via NFS, server message block (SMB), or representational state transfer (REST) that can support cloud deployments of Windows, macOS, and Linux. Two service levels are offered in Azure File: standard and premium.
• Google Cloud Filestore offers two performance tiers of NFS shared storage with up to 64 TB of capacity per share. Premium offers much higher throughput and input/output operations per second than standard.

Here are five things to consider when migrating and running NFS shared storage in the cloud:

1. Maintain the Current NFS File Structures

You don't want to change NFS file constructs if your application already uses them. You should minimize file structure and application changes when transitioning to the cloud. The goal is to optimize performance by maximizing throughput, minimizing latency, and providing high availability simultaneously.

2. Ensure Business Continuity

During cloud migrations, it is essential to factor in downtime due to natural disasters and system failures. There are three components to ensuring business continuity:

• Maintaining high availability while minimizing data loss and recovery time.
• Deploying applications to be highly available and resilient to disasters or infrastructure failures.
• Having complete access during migration to the cloud while you continue to sync and update your systems after the initial migration.

3. Protect File Data

Cloud security should be your top priority to ensure that access to the file system is always under your control. Data security must be addressed at all levels to prevent losses. Data security and privacy regulations must also be met in the new environment.

4. Use Automation

You should automate the cloud migration process to save operational costs and time when deploying and managing multiple databases. Automating administrative tasks such as creating databases, managing backups, and monitoring is easy.

5. Cut Costs

When your NFS file shares are migrated correctly, you can reduce migration costs, lower ongoing cloud service costs, and minimize or eliminate developer costs. Data tiering enables you to run infrequently used, low-performance workloads on inexpensive storage and move high-performance workloads to high-performance drives.

For electronic design automation (EDA) workloads, high-performance NFS shared storage in the cloud works best.

When selecting a cloud provider, ensure your company's data is safe, secure, and accessible. Data should be stored in multiple facilities and on multiple devices with backups. Natural disasters, operational errors, and other unexpected situations can damage your data if you do not spread out your storage geographically.

To fully benefit from shared storage in the cloud, you should choose a provider that can ensure high performance, uptime, accessibility, and speed while keeping costs low.