Volume storage design should be treated with particular care, as it is one of the few components of Nova that stores non-ephemeral data. Most large installations will look at using either the SAN or iSCSI options for this, as it allows them to utilize enterprise-class hardware and software for greater availability and redundancy. However, specialized installations (especially high-performance computing or research) may try the less production-ready drivers (RDB or Sheepdog) if their data survivability is not paramount.