White Papers

Dell HPC NFS Storage Solution High Availability Configurations with Large Capacities
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New server components in this release Table 4.
Server
components
Previous release
(4)
This version
Reason for update
NFS server
PowerEdge R710
NA
Memory per NFS
server
48 GB
96 GB
More memory to
improve performance
where a large cache is
useful. Also to manage
possible XFS repair
operations on the larger
capacity file system.
Operating
System
RHEL 5.5 x86_64
RHEL 6.1 x86_64
Dell has worked with
Red Hat to support
configurations that are
>100TB using XFS with
RHEL 6.1.
Kernel version
2.6.18-194.el5
2.6.32-131.0.15.el6
Update to RHEL 6.1
File system (XFS)
version
2.10.2-7
3.1.1-4
For XFS > 100TB support
10 Gigabit
Ethernet Driver
ixgbe 2.0.44-k2
ixgbe 3.0.12-k2
Driver native to RHEL
InfiniBand driver
Mellanox OFED 1.5.1
Mellanox OFED 1.5.3-
3.0.0
Latest version of
Mellanox OFED at time
of solution release.
SAS cards per
server
1 SAS card for
capacities up to 96TB.
Two SAS cards for
capacities of 192TB.
2 SAS cards.
2 SAS cards improve
server to storage
sequential read
performance by up to
12%.
Evaluation 5.
The architecture proposed in this white paper was evaluated in the Dell HPC lab. This section describes
the test methodology and the test bed used for verification. It also contains details on the functionality
tests.
The performance characterization of the solution is one of the major differences from the previous
version. Hence the performance analysis is presented as a separate section later in this document.
5.1. Method
The NFS Storage Solution described in this solution guide was tested for HA functionality and
performance.
A 144TB NSS-HA configuration was used to test the HA functionality of the solution. Different types of
failures were introduced and the fault tolerance and robustness of the solution was measured. Section