Administrator Guide

Key Features of the Scale-Out NAS
The following table summarizes key features of scale-out NAS.
Feature Description
Shared back-end infrastructure The Storage Center SAN and scale-out NAS leverage the same virtualized disk pool.
File management Storage Center SAN and scale-out NAS management and reporting using Storage
Manager.
High-performance, scale-out NAS Support for a single namespace spanning up to four NAS appliances (eight NAS
controllers).
Capacity scaling Ability to scale a single namespace up to 4-PB capacity with up to eight Storage Centers.
Connectivity options Offers 1GbE and 10GbE copper and optical options for connectivity to the client network.
Highly available and active-active
design
Redundant, hot-swappable NAS controllers in each NAS appliance. Both NAS controllers in
a NAS appliance process I/O.
Multitenancy Multitenancy enables a single physical FluidFS cluster to be connected to several
separated environments and manage each environment individually.
Automatic load balancing Automatic balancing of client connections across network ports and NAS controllers, as
well as back-end I/O across Storage Center volumes.
Multiprotocol support Support for SMB (on Windows), NFS (on UNIX and Linux), and FTP/FTPS protocols with
ability to share user data across all protocols.
Client authentication Controls access to files using local and remote client authentication, including LDAP,
Active Directory, and NIS.
Quota rules Control client space usage.
File security style Choice of file security mode for a NAS volume (UNIX, Windows, or Mixed).
Storage Center Data progression Automatic migration of inactive data to less-expensive drives.
Storage Center Dynamic capacity Thin-provisions the block-level storage allocated to the NAS pool and NAS volumes and
consumes space only when writes occur.
Cache mirroring The write cache is mirrored between NAS controllers, which ensures a high-performance
response to client requests and maintains data integrity in the event of a NAS controller
failure.
Journaling mode In the event of a NAS controller failure, the cache in the peerg NAS controller is written to
storage and the peer NAS controller continues to write directly to storage, which protects
against data loss.
Backup power supply Maintains data integrity in the event of a power failure by keeping a NAS controller online
long enough to write the cache to the internal storage device.
NAS volume thin clones Clones NAS volumes without needing to physically copy the data set.
Deduplication Policy-driven post-process deduplication technology that eliminates redundant data at
rest.
Compression LZPS (Level Zero Processing System) compression algorithm that intelligently shrinks data
at rest.
Metadata protection Metadata is constantly checksummed and stored in multiple locations on both the FS
Series appliance and within the Storage Centers for data consistency and protection.
Snapshots Redirect-on-write snapshots that are user-accessible over the network.
Replication NAS volume-level, snapshot-based, asynchronous replication to remote FluidFS clusters to
enable disaster recovery.
NDMP backup Snapshot-based, asynchronous, two-way backup (direct NDMP), or three-way backup
(remote NDMP) over Ethernet to certified third-party backup solutions.
338 FluidFS Administration