Oak documentation#

Welcome to Oak!#

Oak is a High-Performance Computing (HPC) storage system available to research groups and projects at Stanford for research data. Hosted by the Stanford Research Computing Center (SRCC), Oak provides affordable and scalable storage with a diversity of access methods.

Why use Oak?#

Oak was built from the ground-up to focus on the qualities our users value most:

Affordability

Starting as low as $45/month for 10TB with no charges for ingress/egress, Oak is competetive with major cloud storage providers. For our most up-to-date pricing information, please see our rates page.

Availability

Housed in a state-of-the-art data center on SLAC, Oak storage components are redundant. From servers, to disk array controllers and data paths between servers and disks. It also provides disk mirroring for metadata and double-parity RAID in a 8+2 configuration for data (file content). The use of additional parity allows the storage system to continue to function even if two disks in a volume of ten disks fail simultaneously.

Reliability

Since its inception in 2017, there has not been a single data loss incident on Oak due to system failure.

Accessiblity

Multi-protocol gateways (NFS, CIFS, SSH, Globus)

Scalability

Start with as little as 10TB and grow to Peta-scale with as little as one request.

Oak’s scalable and highly available architecture is based on MD cells (metadata) and I/O cells (data) each with external SAS-3 switches and high-density JBOD chassis designed for the cloud market. The Lustre servers are interconnected through a high-bandwidth and low-latency Infiniband fabric (56 Gb/s links).

Performance

Leveraging dual network fabrics of Infiniband and Ethernet, Oak can communicate with the Sherlock HPC cluster and on-campus resources using some of the fastest commercial network speeds available. Our fastest interconnect is Infiniband HDR, which has a top speed of 200Gb/s!