Smarter Storage: Data and filesystem management on REANNZ's advanced computing platform

Research data management in Aotearoa New Zealand is experiencing unprecedented growth in both scale and complexity, as the nature of research evolves. Today, most disciplines increasingly rely on—and generate—massive volumes of data. In this talk, we share how REANNZ’s advanced computing platform is evolving to meet the growing demands of research data management in Aotearoa New Zealand while ensuring data sovereignty and sustainability.Historically, HPC environments have prioritised performance using parallel file systems such as GPFS. However, these approaches often lack integrated lifecycle management. Modern approaches combine high-performance storage with archival and cloud-based options to balance capacity, cost accessibility and ease of use. This session will showcase the technologies behind our approach, explain the decision-making that shaped it, and outline the processes we’ve put in place for effective data management.ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)Yuriy Halytskyy is a Senior DevOps Engineer and Software Programmer at REANNZ. He has an extensive expertise in automation, infrastructure, and software development to support advanced research computing initiatives.Nathalie Giraudon is the Product Engineering Lead at REANNZ, dedicated to building reliable and sustainable products. She holds a diploma from ENSEEIHT in France and brings over 20 years of experience in telecommunications and product engineering. Outside of work, Nat is training in canoeing as she prepares for future adventures.Kahu Anderson is a Research DevOps Support Engineer at REANNZ, specialising in OpenStack, Kubernetes, and infrastructure automation using Terraform and Ansible. He supports the research community by building reliable, scalable, and secure cloud environments, with a current focus on Cluster API for advanced orchestration.Blair Bethwaite, REANNZ Head of Advanced Computing and Data Services. When not on a bike, squash court, or in the ocean, he specialises in innovation of the underlying systems and platforms to enable his teams to deliver greater value to researchers. He has almost 20 years of experience in distributed computing; both in research and for research; for institutional and national projects; from science application collaborations, through grid & cloud middleware development, to full HPC & cloud system infrastructure design, implementation, and operations. -----For more information about the eResearch NZ / eRangahau Aotearoa conference, visit: https://eresearchnz.co.nz/