Home > Storage > PowerMax and VMAX > Data Protection > Dell PowerMax: Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability > PowerMax engine and director components
The engine is the critical building block of PowerMax systems. It primarily consists of two redundant director boards that house global memory, front-end connectivity, back-end connectivity, internal network communications and environmental monitoring components. Each director board has a dedicated power and cooling system. Even single-engine configurations are fully redundant. A PowerMax system may have between one and eight engines depending on model and configuration.
Table 1 lists the components within an engine, count per director, and defines their purposes.
Director Component | Count (per director) | Purpose |
Power Supply | 2 | Provide redundant power to a director |
Fan | 5 | Provide cooling for a director |
Management Module | 1 | Manage environmental functionality |
NVMe Flash I/O Module | Up to 4 | Safely store data from cache during the vaulting sequence. |
Front-end I/O Module | Up to 4 | Provide front-end connectivity to the array. There are different types of front-end I/O modules that allow connectivity to various interfaces, including Fibre Channel SCSI, Fibre Channel NVMe, iSCSI, FICON, SRDF, and embedded NAS (eNAS). |
PCIe Back-end I/O Module | 2 | Connect the director boards to the back-end of the system, allowing I/O to the system’s drives. |
Compression and Deduplication I/O Module | 1 | Perform inline data compression and deduplication |
Fabric I/O module | 1 | Provides connectivity between directors. In multi-engine PowerMax 8000 systems, the fabric I/O modules are connected to an internal InfiniBand switch. |
Memory module | 16 | Global memory component |
Figure 3 displays the front view of a PowerMax engine.
The following figures display back views of engine components, with logical port numbering.
Note that a single-engine PowerMax 8000 system requires four NVMe Flash I/O modules per director compared to a multi-engine PowerMax 8000 which requires three NVMe Flash I/O modules per director. The four NVMe Flash I/O modules per director configuration will remain even if additional engines are added to the system. This must be considered when ordering new systems as the additional NVMe Flash I/O module reduces the number of external I/O modules, thus reducing the total number of external ports.