Administrator Guide
9
Dell Fluid Cache for SAN Cluster Administration
Dell Fluid Cache for SAN is a server-side caching accelerator that makes high speed PCIe SSDs a shared, distributed cache resource.
Fluid Cache is deployed on clusters of PowerEdge servers within a SAN, connected by RoCE-enabled network adapters.
Required Components and Privileges for Fluid Cache Clusters
To deploy a Fluid Cache cluster, one or more Storage Centers and Storage Manager are required plus connection to Fluid Cache
servers with cache devices. Administrator privileges are required to create a cluster, but other user types can perform certain tasks.
The following tables describes how these components and privileges interact.
Component Function
Cache Servers One to nine PowerEdge servers
• To make the cluster fully redundant, use at least three
servers.
• To use write-back caching, at least two cache devices must
be present in the cluster and installed in separate servers.
• To use write-through caching, at least one cache device
must be present in the cluster.
Storage Center Provides the back-end storage (the SAN) to the Fluid Cache
cluster
Switches
• One dedicated switch connecting all the cache servers
• One or more Fibre Channel and/or iSCSI switches
connecting the Storage Centers (the SAN) to the network
of systems using the SAN
• One or more switches that provide management access
through the cache server switch and the Storage Center
switch(es)
Network adapters
• Network adapters must support RoCE (RDMA over
Converged Ethernet) for inter-cluster communication
Storage Manager Provides management and reporting functionality, including:
• Adding Fluid Cache servers to a Fluid Cache cluster
• Assigning Storage Centers to a Fluid Cache cluster
• Monitoring the Fluid Cache cluster
Storage Manager version 2014 R2 or later required
The following are Fluid Cache privileges and are distinct from Storage Manager privileges of the same names.
Privilege
Fluid Cache Cluster Function
Administrator Has full access to all new API methods on the Fluid Cache API
objects
Volume Manager Can create Storage Center volumes and edit Fluid Cache options
on the volume's mapping to the cluster. It cannot do any
conguration on the cluster as a whole
Dell Fluid Cache for SAN Cluster Administration
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