RunPod Network and Storage Analysis

RunPod Network and Storage Analysis | Generated by AI

Home 2026.07

Analysis Summary

1. Where Was the Pod?

38.80.152.249 is in Rancho Cordova, California (near Sacramento):

Field	Value
City	Rancho Cordova, California
ISP	Cogent Communications (AS174) — a major transit provider
Data center	Likely a RunPod Secure Cloud facility in CA
Lat/Lng	38.5891, -121.3027

RunPod routes traffic through Cogent to their data center, then the IP is a NAT on their load balancer — not directly the GPU machine.

2. How RunPod Networking Works

RunPod has a layered architecture:

You (SSH) → RunPod Load Balancer → Docker Container (your pod)
                    ↓
             Internal:
          NFS Network Volume
          Global Networking (pod-to-pod)

SSH / TCP Access (what we used):

You connect to 38.80.152.249:30520 — this is the RunPod load balancer IP, not the actual GPU server
Port 30520 is a TCP tunnel that maps to port 22 on the pod’s container
On restart, the port changes (was 30416 → 30520), but the IP stays the same (for Secure Cloud)

The pod itself runs in Docker:

Host machine (NVIDIA H200)
  └── Docker container
       ├── /          → 20G overlay (ephemeral OS)
       ├── /workspace → NFS volume (persistent, 280G in our case)
       └── root user

That’s why / was only 20G (ephemeral container disk) and /workspace was 280G (network volume).

Network Volume (persistent storage):

10.100.232.10:/runpodfs/networkvolumes/7tlpgx7y0n  280G  104G  176G  /workspace

This is an NFS mount from RunPod’s storage cluster
Volume ID: 7tlpgx7y0n
Survives pod stop/start — data was there when you restarted
Attachable across multiple pods in the same data center
Charged for storage even when pod is stopped

Three storage tiers:

Type	Location	Persists across	Lifetime
Container disk (`/`)	Local SSD on host	Nothing	Ephemeral
Volume disk (`/workspace`)	Local SSD on host	Stop/start	Until pod terminated
Network volume	NFS cluster	Everything	Until deleted

You used a network volume (based on the NFS mount at 10.100.232.10) — that’s why your data survived the stop/restart.

Community Cloud vs Secure Cloud:

	Community Cloud	Secure Cloud (yours)
GPU availability	Shared, competitive	Guaranteed
IP stability	Changes on restart	Stable IP
Data center access	Anyone	Controlled
Network volumes	Yes	Yes

Since you were on Secure Cloud, the IP 38.80.152.249 stayed the same, but the TCP port changed (30416 → 30520) because the Docker container got a new identity on restart.

Global networking (optional): private pod-to-pod network via pod_id.runpod.internal — useful if running multiple pods that need to talk to each other, but not relevant for a single pod.

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