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Without the Dell multipath driver, a single NFS mount can only route to one PowerScale storage node IP address.
In contrast, the Dell multipath driver allows NFS clients to direct I/O to multiple PowerScale nodes for higher aggregate single-client throughput.
The multipath driver enables a single NFS mount point to route to multiple node IP addresses. A group of IP addresses consists of one logical NFS client with the remote endpoint (cluster) using multiple remote machines (nodes), implementing a distributed server architecture.
The principle NFS mount options of interest with the multipath client driver are:
Mount option | Description |
nconnect | Allows the admin to specify the number of TCP connections the client can establish between itself and the NFS server. It works with remoteports to spread load across multiple target interfaces. |
localports | A new mount option that allows a client to use its multiple NICs to multiplex I/O. |
remoteports | A new mount option that allows a client to target multiple servers/ NICS to multiplex I/O. Remoteports spreads the load to multiple file handles instead of taking a single file handle to avoid thrashing on locks. |