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Dell Storage for HPC with Intel Enterprise Edition 2.3 for Lustre sofware

3.3 Object Storage Servers

The Object Storage Servers, shown in Figure 7, are arranged in two-node high availability (HA) clusters

providing active/active access to two Dell PowerVault MD3460 high-density storage arrays each with

MD3060e expansions. Each PowerVault MD3460 array is fully populated with 60 – 4TB 3.5” NL SAS

drives. The capacity of each PowerVault MD3460 array is extended with one additional PowerVault

MD3060e high-density expansion array. This configuration offers each OSS pair with a raw storage

capacity of 960TB.

Figure 7: Object Storage Server Pair

s SAS

ACTIVE

MD3460 MD3460

MD3060e

6Gb/s

SAS

12Gb/s SAS

s SAS

Gb/

s SAS

12Gb/s SAS

Object Storage Server #1 Object Storage Server #2

6Gb/s

SAS

6Gb/s

SAS

6Gb/s

SAS

FAILOVER (HA)

The Object Storage Servers are the building blocks of the solution. With two dual port 12Gb/s SAS

controllers in each PowerEdge R630, the two servers are redundantly connected to each of two

PowerVault MD3460 high density storage arrays.

Figure 8 illustrates how each storage array is divided into six RAID 6 virtual disks, with eight data and

two parity disks per virtual disk, using two disks per tray of the array. That yields six Object Storage

Targets per enclosure. By using RAID 6, the solution provides higher reliability at a marginal cost on

write performance (due to the extra set of parity data required by each RAID 6). Each OST provides

about 29TB of formatted object storage space. With the Dell Storage for HPC with Intel EE for Lustre

solution, a single OSS pair has 24 OSTs by adding the PowerVault MD3060e expansion arrays to the

MD3460 arrays. The OSTs are exposed to clients with LNet via 56Gb/s Infiniband FDR connections.

When viewed from any compute node equipped with the Lustre client, the entire namespace can be

viewed and managed like any other file system, but with the enhancements of Lustre management.