Question

A visual effects studio is building a rendering farm on Compute Engine consisting of 300 VMs that must simultaneously read and write to a shared POSIX-compliant file system. The workload requires sustained aggregate throughput of several GB/s and low-latency access to a 50 TB working set. The team wants a fully managed service and prefers not to operate their own file server cluster. Which storage option best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Create a Cloud Filestore instance using the High Scale or Enterprise tier and mount it via NFS on all rendering VMs

Answer

Store the working set in a Cloud Storage bucket and access it from each VM using gcsfuse

Answer

Attach a single 50 TB regional persistent disk to a controller VM and export it over NFS to the rendering VMs

Answer

Provision a Cloud Filestore Basic HDD instance and mount it via NFS on all rendering VMs