Administrator Guide

Storage Center
The Storage Center provides the FS8600 scale-out NAS storage capacity; the FS8600 cannot be used as a standalone NAS appliance.
Storage Centers eliminate the need to have separate storage capacity for block and le storage. In addition, Storage Center features, such
as Dynamic Capacity and Data Progression, are automatically applied to NAS volumes.
SAN Network
The FS8600 shares a back-end infrastructure with the Storage Center. The SAN network connects the FS8600 to the Storage Center and
carries the block-level trac. The FS8600 communicates with the Storage Center using either the iSCSI or Fibre Channel protocol,
depending on which NAS appliance conguration you purchased.
Internal Network
The internal network is used for communication between NAS controllers. Each of the NAS controllers in the FluidFS cluster must have
access to all other NAS controllers in the FluidFS cluster to achieve the following goals:
• Provide connectivity for FluidFS cluster creation
• Act as a heartbeat mechanism to maintain high availability
• Enable internal data transfer between NAS controllers
• Enable cache mirroring between NAS controllers
• Enable balanced client distribution between NAS controllers
LAN/Client Network
The LAN/client network is used for client access to the SMB shares, NFS exports, and the FTP landing directory. It is also used by the
storage administrator to manage the
FluidFS cluster. The FluidFS cluster is assigned one or more virtual IP addresses (client VIPs) on the
client network that allow clients to access the FluidFS cluster as a single entity. The client VIP also enables load balancing between NAS
controllers, and ensures failover in the event of a NAS controller failure.
If client access to the FluidFS cluster is not through a router (in other words, a at network), dene one client VIP per NAS controller. If
clients access the FluidFS cluster through a router, dene a client VIP for each client interface port per NAS controller.
Data Caching and Redundancy
New and modied les are rst written to the cache, and then cache data is immediately mirrored to the peer NAS controller (mirroring
mode). Data caching provides high performance, while cache mirroring between peer NAS
controllers ensures data redundancy. Cache
data is ultimately transferred to permanent storage asynchronously through optimized data-placement schemes.
When cache mirroring is not possible, such as a single NAS controller failure or when the BPS battery status is low, NAS controllers write
directly to storage (journaling mode).
File Metadata Protection
The FluidFS cluster has several built-in measures to store and protect le metadata (which includes information such as name, owner,
permissions, date created, date modied, and a soft link to the le’s storage location).
• All metadata updates are recorded constantly to storage to avoid potential corruption or data loss in the event of a power failure.
• Metadata is replicated on two separate volumes.
• Metadata is managed through a separate caching scheme.
356
FluidFS Administration