This was written by my coworker, Kilian Cavalotti. We have two main file stores: $SCRATCH is a Lustre cluster, which is extremely performant but doesn't do well with lots of inodes. And $HOME is a multi-node Isilon, which can handle all the inodes, but is not as performant. And we have users who sometimes like to put many files in single directories.
You can find more information about us at https://srcc.stanford.edu
And you can find more information about Sherlock at https://www.sherlock.stanford.edu