Dell HPC NFS Storage Solutions (NSS)

Dell HPC NFS Storage Solutions (NSS)

Dell has developed the Dell™ High-Performance Computing (HPC) Network File System (NFS) Storage Solution (NSS) with your needs in mind. Through extensive hardware and software testing and tuning to achieve an optimum combination of performance, availability, system resiliency and data reliability, Dell is able to offer you configurations that have achieved up to 30 percent better throughput performance when compared to nonoptimized solutions.

We know it is important for you to have a complete NFS storage solution that has been tuned for performance, availability and reliability, and that is serviced by one provider. The Dell HPC NSS is sold and serviced by Dell as a complete solution that leverages the power of Dell PowerEdge™ R710, PowerVault™ MD1200 and PowerVault MD3200 storage platforms. The standard NSS solution offerings include all you need in one package: hardware, software, file system, spare drives and Dell ProSupport™.

Why Dell HPC NFS Storage Solution?

Compute nodes in an HPC environment almost always require a common file system for applications, data and tools. NFS provides a simple and robust access protocol to such a common file system. Storage solutions based on the NFS protocol are widely used for HPC clusters because NFS is simple, time-tested, easy to use and install, has known failure modes and is a standard package in virtually every Linux® distribution. These characteristics make NFS an attractive online storage solution for many HPC installations.

The Dell HPC NSS, when used as back-end NFS storage over 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) or InfiniBand™ fabrics in an HPC environment, offers a storage solution that is easy to deploy, configure and manage. With Dell-recommended best practices, the Dell HPC NSS becomes well suited for use in HPC clusters.

When should you consider Dell HPC NSS storage solutions?

• If you are using a cluster(s) with 4 to 64 nodes, consider using the Dell HPC NSS for your primary storage needs to run applications, including permanent storage, data storage, user data and home directories
• If you are running larger HPC clusters, the Dell HPC NSS can be a good fit for your primary storage needs to store user home directories, application input data or results
• If you need 20TB–80TB of usable capacity in a single namespace 
• If you are looking for a general purpose high-performance Linux-based file server 

Key Features

Some key features of Dell HPC NSS include:

• Dell best practices and recommended configurations — The solution is available to you in Dell-recommended configurations along with Dell-developed best practices for configuring and tuning the storage system to achieve optimal performance.
• Your choice of configurations — Because we believe in providing options, the solution is available either with Quad Data Rate (QDR) InfiniBand or 10GbE connectivity. Both InfiniBand and Ethernet configurations are available either in: small (20TB usable storage), medium (40TB usable storage) or large (80TB usable storage) configurations.
• Increased availability — Option of Highly Available (HA) configurations enhances access to user data. Two NFS gateway servers operating in an active/standby configuration provide increased availability in case of a failure on the active server. 
• Modular approach for higher scalability — Using standards-based Dell PowerEdge and PowerVault products, and Red Hat® Scalable File System (XFS), the Dell HPC NFS storage solution offers you a modular approach to architecting a storage solution that scales up to 80TB within a single namespace.
• High data throughput — To meet the ever-increasing performance demands of your applications, the Dell NSS solution provides high data throughput. For example, the NSS Large-HA configuration using QDR InfiniBand interface for clients can provide up to 2.4GB/s aggregate read throughput and up to 1.2GB/s of write throughput for 64 NFS clients.
• Superior customer support — All the hardware and software components of the solution are fully supported by experienced Dell and Red Hat customer support professionals. Furthermore, a 3-year support for the complete solution is included in the standard offerings.

Building Blocks

The building blocks of Dell HPC NFS Storage Solution are:

• Dell PowerEdge R710 NFS Server — This server runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 operating system, which is Red Hat's highly XFS and Red Hat Cluster Suite (only in high available configurations), which provides file access to user data. Depending on the customer environment, the PowerEdge R710 server can be configured either with a QDR InfiniBand card or a 10GbE Ethernet card. The PowerEdge R710 also includes RAID-1 for the OS for improved system resiliency, as well as a dedicated high-performance swap space (two drives in RAID-0) to improve file system management (such as file system check).
• Dell PowerVault MD3200 Direct-Attached Storage — This storage provides shared RAID storage for the two PowerEdge R710 NFS gateway servers in the HA configurations. The MD3200 comes fully populated with twelve 2TB NL SAS (7200 rpm) drives configured in RAID-6 to enhance data availability.
• Dell PowerVault MD1200 Direct-Attached Storage — This expansion storage solution provides the storage space for user data using 2TB near-line serial attached SCSI (NL SAS) drives, 7200 rpm drives for an outstanding dollar per GB usage model.  
• Spare kits — Cold spare 2TB NL SAS drives are included in the configurations so that you can quickly swap out drives in the event of a drive failure. These are essential to ensure you have the best possible experience, performance and data resiliency.

Standard offerings