White Papers

Dell HPC NFS Storage Solution High Availability Configurations with Large Capacities
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Contents
Executive summary (Updated May 2012) .............................................................................. 6
Introduction ....................................................................................................... 7 1.
NSS-HA solution review .......................................................................................... 7 2.
2.1. Availability in NSS-HA ..................................................................................... 9
NSS-HA architecture ........................................................................................... 10 3.
3.1. Storage in NSS-HA ........................................................................................ 11
3.2. Potential failures and fault tolerant mechanisms in NSS-HA ..................................... 13
New components and updates from previous versions of the solution ............................... 14 4.
4.1. Storage density ........................................................................................... 14
4.2. Storage configuration ................................................................................... 15
4.3. Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system ......................................................... 15
4.4. Red Hat scalable file system package ................................................................ 16
4.5. Summary of changes ..................................................................................... 16
Evaluation ....................................................................................................... 17 5.
5.1. Method ..................................................................................................... 17
5.2. Test bed ................................................................................................... 18
5.3. Tuning options ............................................................................................ 22
5.4. Functionality tests ....................................................................................... 23
Performance tests .............................................................................................. 25 6.
6.1. InfiniBand sequential writes and reads............................................................... 26
6.2. 10 Gigabit Ethernet sequential writes and reads ................................................... 27
6.3. Random writes and reads ............................................................................... 29
6.4. Metadata tests ............................................................................................ 31
6.5. NFSv3 compared to NFSv4 .............................................................................. 34
Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 36 7.
References ....................................................................................................... 37 8.
Appendix A: NSS-HA Recipe (Updated May 2012) .................................................................. 38
A.1. Pre-install preparation ..................................................................................... 39
A.1.1. NSS-HA cluster specification ........................................................................ 40
A.1.2. Checklist ................................................................................................ 42
A.2. Server hardware setup ..................................................................................... 43
A.2.1. Checklist ................................................................................................ 44
A.3. Server software configuration ............................................................................ 45
A.3.1. Install RHEL 6.1, configure swap disks, and install XFS packages. ........................... 45