Administrator Guide

Feature Description
Antivirus scanning SMB antivirus scanning offloading using certified third-party, Internet Content Adaptation
Protocol (ICAP)-enabled antivirus solutions.
Monitoring Built-in performance monitoring and capacity planning.
Overview of the FS8600 Hardware
Scale-out NAS consists of one to six FS8600 appliances configured as a FluidFS cluster. Each NAS appliance is a rack-mounted
2U chassis that contains two hot-swappable NAS controllers in an active-active configuration. In a NAS appliance, the second
NAS controller with which one NAS controller is paired is called the peer controller. Scale-out NAS supports expansion, that is,
you can start with one NAS appliance and add NAS appliances to the FluidFS cluster as needed to increase performance.
NAS appliance numbers start at 1 and NAS controller numbers start at 0. Appliance 1 contains Controller 0 and Controller 1,
Appliance 2 contains Controller 2 and Controller 3, and so on. To identify the physical hardware displayed in Storage Manager,
you must match the service tag shown in Storage Manager with the service tag printed on a sticker on the front-right side of
the NAS appliance.
The following FS8600 appliance configurations are available. All NAS appliances in a FluidFS cluster must use the same
configuration—mixing 1GbE and 10GbE, or Fibre Channel and iSCSI, is not supported.
● 1Gb Ethernet client connectivity with 8Gb Fibre Channel back‑end connectivity to the Storage Center
● 10Gb Ethernet client connectivity with 8Gb Fibre Channel back‑end connectivity to the Storage Center
● 10Gb Ethernet client connectivity with 10Gb Ethernet iSCSI back‑end connectivity to the Storage Center
NOTE:
There are two RAM configurations for the 10GbE models - 24GB and 48GB, which should not be mixed in the same
appliance, but can be mixed in the cluster.
Internal Backup Power Supply
Each NAS controller is equipped with an internal backup power supply (BPS) that protects data during a power failure. The
BPS provides continuous power to the NAS controllers for a minimum of 5 minutes in case of a power failure and has sufficient
battery power to allow the NAS controllers to safely shut down. In addition, the BPS provides enough time for the NAS
controllers to write all data from the cache to nonvolatile internal storage.
The NAS controllers regularly monitor the BPS battery status, which requires the BPS to maintain a minimum level of power for
normal operation. To ensure the BPS battery status is accurate, the NAS controllers routinely undergo battery calibration cycles.
During a battery calibration cycle, the BPS goes through charge and discharge cycles; therefore, battery error events during this
process are expected. A battery calibration cycle takes up to 7 days to complete. If a NAS controller starts a battery calibration
cycle, and the peer NAS controller BPS has failed, the NAS controllers enter journaling mode. Entering this mode might impact
performance, so you should repair a failed BPS as soon as possible.
Internal Storage
Each NAS controller has an internal storage device that is used only for the FluidFS images and for a cache storage offload
location in the event of a power failure. The internal hard drive does not provide the NAS storage capacity.
Internal Cache
Each NAS controller has an internal cache that provides fast reads and reliable writes.
Overview of the FS8600 Architecture
Scale-out NAS consists of these components:
● Hardware
○ FluidFS cluster
○ Storage Center
● NAS appliance network interface connections
○ SAN network
FluidFS Administration
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