Every PowerStore appliance is deployed into a PowerStore cluster. There is a minimum of one PowerStore appliance and a maximum of four PowerStore appliances that you can configure in the cluster. You can create a cluster made up of all PowerStore T model appliances or all PowerStore X appliances, but you cannot mix appliances with both models in the same cluster. When a multi-appliance cluster is deployed, you can perform this task during the initial configuration process or add appliances to an existing cluster. You can scale down PowerStore clusters by removing appliances from an existing cluster. As of PowerStoreOS 3.2, multi-appliance clustering for PowerStore X appliances is no longer supported.
Clustering PowerStore appliances can provide many benefits:
- Easy scale-out to increase CPU, memory, storage capacity, and front-end connectivity
- Independent scaling of storage and compute resources
- Centralized management for multi-appliance cluster
- Automated orchestration for host connectivity
- Increased resiliency and fault tolerance
Consider the example shown in the following figure. Users can scale out appliances with different model numbers to create a four-appliance cluster. Besides the scale-out benefit, each appliance can scale up with different numbers of expansion enclosures. For example, each appliance that is shown has a different number of expansion enclosures attached. Finally, each appliance in the cluster can have different media types. For example, one PowerStore model could have NVMe SCM drives, while the other three PowerStore models could have NVMe SSD drives. This flexible scale-out and scale-up deployment gives customers the ability to grow their clusters with no dependence on the model number, drive count, or even drive type.
Figure 1. Multi-appliance cluster