White Papers

Dell HPC NFS Storage Solution - High Availability (NSS6.0-HA) Configuration with Dell PowerEdge 13
th
Generation Servers
9
3. Dell PowerVault MD3460 and MD3060e storage arrays
As compared to previous versions of the NSS-HA solution, a major change in the current version is the
introduction of 4TB disks. In the previouse NSS-HA solutions
(3), (4), (5), (6)
, 3TB disks were used. The
PowerVault MD3460 and MD3060e storage arrays were used in NSS5.5-HA
(6)
, and they are still being
used in NSS6.0-HA.
Both PowerVault MD3460
(8)
and MD3060e
(9)
storage array are 4U, 60 drive dense enclosures. The major
difference between them is that MD3460 has dual active/active RAID controllers and is used as an RBOD
(Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks Bunch of Disks), while, MD3060e is an EBOD (expansion bunch of
disks), which is usually used to extend the capacity of the PowerVault MD3460.
NSS6.0-HA shares the same storage configurations as NSS5.5-HA except using 4TB disks instead of 3TB
disks. Table 2 summarizes the supported storage configurations of the NSS6.0-HA.
Storage configurations in NSS6.0-HA Table 2.
Storage
configurations
240TB: One PowerVault MD3460.
480TB: One PowerVault MD3460 + One PowerVault MD3060e.
Disks in
storage array
4TB NL SAS.
Virtual disk
configuration
RAID-6 8+2, a virtual disk is created across all five drawers in a storage array, two
disks per drawer.
Segment size 512KiB.
Write cache mirroring enabled.
Read cache enabled.
Dynamic cache read prefetch enabled.
Storage
enclosure
cabling
Chain cabling scheme.
Logical
volume
configuration
Stripe element size: 512KiB.
Number of stripes: 6.
Number of virtual disks per logical volume:
6 virual disks for 240TB configuration,
12 virtual disks for 480TB configuration.