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Improving NFS Performance on HPC Clusters with Dell Fluid Cache for DAS
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Contents
Executive Summary ....................................................................................................... 5
1. Introduction ........................................................................................................... 6
1.1. Dell Fluid Cache for DAS (direct-attached storage) ..................................................... 6
2. Solution design and architecture.................................................................................. 6
2.1. NFS storage solution (baseline) ............................................................................. 7
2.2. Dell Fluid Cache for DAS based solution .................................................................. 9
2.3. I/O clients test bed ......................................................................................... 10
2.4. Solution tuning ............................................................................................... 12
2.4.1. Storage .................................................................................................. 13
2.4.2. NFS server .............................................................................................. 13
2.4.3. Dell Fluid Cache for DAS ............................................................................. 14
2.5. Tracking solution health and performance ............................................................. 14
2.5.1. Server health and monitoring ....................................................................... 14
2.5.2. Dell PowerEdge Express Flash PCIe SSD health and monitoring .............................. 14
2.5.3. Dell Fluid Cache for DAS health and monitoring ................................................. 16
3. Performance ........................................................................................................ 16
3.1. Sequential writes and reads ............................................................................... 17
3.2. Random writes and reads .................................................................................. 19
3.3. Metadata tests ............................................................................................... 20
3.4. Cold-cache tests ............................................................................................. 22
4. Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 25
5. References .......................................................................................................... 25
Appendix A: Step-by-step configuration of Dell Fluid Cache for NFS .......................................... 27
A.1. Hardware checklist and cabling .......................................................................... 27
A.2. NFS server set up ............................................................................................ 28
A.3. NFS server configuration and tuning ..................................................................... 29
A.4. Virtual disk configuration .................................................................................. 31
A.5. XFS and DFC configuration................................................................................. 33
A.6. Useful commands and references ........................................................................ 34
A.7. Performance tuning on clients ............................................................................ 34
Appendix B: Benchmarks and tests ................................................................................... 35
B.1. IOzone ......................................................................................................... 35
B.2. mdtest ......................................................................................................... 37