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PowerFlex software-defined storage offers flexibility of deployment architecture to help best meet the specific deployment and architectural requirements. PowerFlex can be deployed in a two-layer (Independent), single-layer (Hyperconverged/HCI), or a mixture of the two architectures (Mixed). OpenShift environments on PowerFlex use a two-layer (independent) architecture.
In an independent architecture, or two-layer architecture, some nodes provide storage capacity and host datasets while other, separate, and independent nodes, host applications and workloads. Compute and storage resources can be scaled independently by adding nodes to the cluster. This separation of compute and storage resources can also help minimize software licensing costs in certain situations. And this architecture can be ideal for hosting high-performance high-value databases and application workloads.
In an HCI architecture, each node in the cluster contributes storage resources and hosts applications and workloads. This architecture allows you to scale your infrastructure uniformly and with a predefined building block that adds both storage and compute resources. This architecture is appropriate for data center and workload consolidation.
A mixed architecture is a combination of both the HCI and Independent architectures. As shown in Figure 3 there are some storages only nodes, compute only nodes, and HCI nodes as a part of the same PowerFlex cluster. This is a desirable architecture when working with an existing compute infrastructure and adding high-performance software-defined infrastructure. This can also be a starting point for a two-layer deployment design as external workloads are migrated to PowerFlex.