I should have been more gentle in my statement, for that I apologise. if you do start again _and_ move to the cloud, AWS's lustre interface (FSx) is good enoug

I should have been more gentle in my statement, for that I apologise. if you do start again _and_ move to the cloud, AWS's lustre interface (FSx) is good enough (if expensive) or EFS, although that has slower metadata performance. Its good enough at RW iops though, assuming you monitor it correctly. I feel your pain, and sympathise deeply. Best of luck!