Multi-tenant storage—also referred to as multitenancy—helps organizations develop applications faster and more efficiently.
It does this by enabling multiple users to both share the resources of a centralized storage architecture and customize their storage environments without affecting the others.
You can think of multi-tenant storage as being like an apartment building. The building’s tenants share a common infrastructure and related services, such as heat, hot water and electricity. Yet each tenant can also set up their individual apartment to suit their unique needs.
When it comes to data storage, leveraging a multi-tenant approach also helps lower each user’s overhead costs. It does this by distributing maintenance fees across all users. Also, tenants can share applications, security features and other infrastructure.
Multitenancy for Cloud, SaaS, AI
Chances are, your customers are already using multi-tenant storage architecture to their advantage. Public cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud all serve multiple tenants from a shared infrastructure.
Popular SaaS providers including Dropbox also employ multitenancy to offer millions of customers a unique experience based on a common user interface. Each user’s data store is available to them only, despite its being kept in a common data warehouse.
AI-related workloads will become increasingly common in multi-tenant environments, too. That includes the use of large language models (LLMs) to enable Generative AI. Also, certain AI and ML workloads may be more effective in situations in which they feed—and are fed by—multiple tenants.
In addition, all users in a multitenancy environment can contribute data for AI training, which requires enormous quantities of data. And because each tenant creates a unique data set, this process may offer a wider array of training data more efficiently compared to a single source.
What’s more, data flowing in the other direction—from the AI model to each tenant—also increases efficiency. By sharing a common AI application, tenants gain access to a larger, more sophisticated resource than they would with single tenancy.
Choosing the Right Solution
Whether your customers opt for single tenant, multi-tenant or a combination of the two, they must deploy hardware that can withstand rigorous workloads.
Supermicro’s ASG-1115S–NE3X12R storage server is just such a storage solution. This system offers eight front hot-swap E3.S 1T PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe drive bays; four front fixed E3.S 2T PCIe 5.0 x8 CXL Type 3 drive bays; and two M.2 NVMe slots.
Processing gets handled by a single AMD EPYC 9004-series CPU. It offers up to 128 cores and 6TB of ECC DDR5 main memory.
Considering the Supermicro storage server’s 12 drives, eight heavy-duty fans and 1600W redundant Titanium Level power supply, you might assume that it takes up a lot of rack space. But no. Astonishingly, the entire system is housed in a single 1U chassis.
Do More:
- Learn about and register to attend the Supermicro Open Storage Summit ‘24, streaming live Aug. 13 - 29.
- Download the data sheet: Supermicro ASG-1115S-NE3X12R storage server powered by an AMD EPYC 9004 series processor