An AI platform team is investigating poor I/O performance for a specific workload that involves processing hundreds of thousands of small metadata files. The application is running on a Kubernetes cluster with storage provided by a NetApp ONTAP system over NFS. Performance metrics show acceptable network throughput but very high latency for metadata operations (e.g., open, stat, close).
The current storage configuration is as follows:
Storage_System: NetApp AFF A-Series
Protocol: NFSv4.1
Workload_Profile: Metadata-intensive, many small file lookups
Observed_Issue: High latency on metadata operations, slow job completion Which storage architecture would be better suited to handle this specific metadata-intensive workload?