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About Storage

This page explains how storage works with your resources and ACTIVATE.

Note

We make a distinction between the storage you create on the ACTIVATE platform and the storage you create outside the ACTIVATE platform. The information on this page and our pages for creating, configuring, attaching, and sharing storage apply to storage resources made on the platform.

If you would rather create storage outside ACTIVATE, or if you have existing storage resources that you'd like to work with, please see the following:

Our section Transferring Data contains instructions for AWS, Azure, and Google.

Storage Types​

When creating storage resources, you’ll choose whether your storage is ephemeral or persistent.

Ephemeral storage is created and destroyed with a cluster. This type of storage is provisioned when you start the cluster it’s attached to, and it’s destroyed when you stop the cluster. Ephemeral storage resources do not have a power button, and they won't appear in the Storage Resources module on the the Compute page.

Persistent storage is created and destroyed independently. If you want to destroy a persistent storage resource, you can do so from the Storage page by clicking the power button.

Persistent storage can be attached to multiple clusters.

At this time, only Lustre storage options can be ephemeral.

Storage Provisioning Logs​

For persistent storage resources, you can see the creation and deletion logs in this tab. All logs for current and previous sessions will be displayed. If a persistent storage resource is active, you’ll see all the clusters that the storage is attached to. For more information, please see Sessions in Configuring Storage.

Ephemeral storage resources do not have a Sessions page. Instead, you can see their creation logs by navigating to Resources > ResourceName > Sessions > Logs > Storages. For more information, please see Sessions in Configuring Clusters.

Buckets​

Typically, users would have to use a cloud service provider’s CLI to upload or retrieve data from a bucket. With our new filesystem feature, buckets are instead mounted as a filesystem; this way, you can interact with a bucket as if it’s a directory rather than using CLI commands.