Best practices for Dell APEX Block Storage for AWS include:
- When setting up PowerFlex SDS, deploy instances in different AZs for increased availability and fault tolerance.
- Ensure that cluster EC2 instances (c5n) are in a private subnet and are not directly internet-facing. The subnet can be behind a NAT gateway that allows downloading software updates and packages for better security and control.
- Use a public subnet for external-facing resources that communicate with the Internet.
- Use the appropriate Amazon EC2 instances and volume types (i3en for instance store and c5n for EBS storage), which are optimized for low latency and high I/O performance.
- Since instance store disks are ephemeral and their data is deleted when the system is shut down (excluding reboots). Ensure to plan accordingly by using system backup procedures before shutting down the PowerFlex system.
- Ensure that you understand the scope of the AWS resources and their availability. For example, instance store (NVMe storage) is ephemeral, but remains persistent if an instance reboots and is protected by PowerFlex SDS RAID 1 mesh when one SDS instance is shut down at a time. When using EBS storage, EBS volumes are tied to a specific AZ and if that AZ becomes unavailable so will the storage. A multi-AZ deployment will provide resiliency in such situations.