APEX File Storage for AWS is a software-defined and customer-managed scale-out storage solution running on AWS cloud infrastructure. It brings the Dell Technologies PowerScale OneFS distributed file system into the public cloud, allowing users to have the same management experience as on their on-premises PowerScale appliances. You can run OneFS on multiple EC2 instances backed by EBS volumes, and then form a OneFS cluster with the EC2 instances’ virtual nodes.
In general, cluster performance is related to your cluster size. Larger cluster size delivers higher throughput and IOPS. Therefore, before creating your cluster in AWS, consider the capacity of storage and number of nodes that you need for your business workflow.
Figure 1 shows the architecture of APEX File Storage for AWS.
- Availability zone: APEX File Storage for AWS is designed to run in a spread strategy placement group within a single availability zone to get the best performance.
- VPC: APEX File Storage for AWS requires an AWS VPC to provide network connectivity.
- OneFS cluster internal subnet: the cluster nodes communicate with each other through the internal subnet. The internal subnet must be isolated from instances that are not in the cluster. Therefore, a dedicated subnet is required for the internal network interfaces of cluster nodes that do not share the internal subnets with other EC2 instances.
- OneFS cluster external subnet: the cluster nodes communicate with clients through the external subnet by using different protocols, such as NFS, SMB, and S3.
- OneFS cluster internal network interfaces: network interfaces that are located in the internal subnet.
- OneFS cluster external network interfaces: network interfaces that are located in the external subnet.
- OneFS cluster internal security group: the security group applies to the cluster internal network interfaces which allows all traffic between the cluster nodes’ internal network interfaces only.
- OneFS cluster external security group: the security group applies to cluster external network interfaces which allows specific ingress traffic from clients.
- EC2 instance nodes: cluster nodes which run the OneFS filesystem backed by EBS volumes and provide network bandwidth.
Figure 1. APEX File Storage for AWS architecture