Home > Storage > PowerStore > Virtualization and Cloud > Dell PowerStore and SUSE Rancher > Terminology
The following table provides definitions for some of the terms that are used in this document.
Term | Definition |
Appliance | Solution containing a base enclosure and attached expansion enclosures. The size of an appliance could be only the base enclosure or the base enclosure plus expansion enclosures. |
Base enclosure | Enclosure containing both nodes (node A and node B) and 25 NVMe drive slots. |
CNCF | The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is an open-source software foundation that promotes the adoption of cloud native computing. |
Containers | Containers are lightweight, standalone packages that contain the code, libraries, and dependencies needed to run a piece of software. They are used to deploy applications and microservices consistently across different platforms. |
CSI | The Container Storage Interface (CSI) is a standard specification for a consistent, plugin-based API for Kubernetes. |
Expansion enclosure | Enclosures that can be attached to a base enclosure to provide additional storage. |
Helm | Helm is a Kubernetes package manager. It manages Kubernetes applications using Helm charts. |
Kubernetes | Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform. |
NDU | A non-disruptive upgrade (NDU) updates PowerStore and maximizes its availability by performing rolling updates. This includes updates for PowerStore software releases, hotfixes, and hardware and disk firmware. |
NVMe | Non-Volatile Memory Express is a communication interface and driver for accessing non-volatile storage media such as solid-state drives (SSD) and SCM drives through the PCIe bus. |
NVRAM | Non-volatile random-access memory is persistent random-access memory that retains data without an electrical charge. NVRAM drives are used in a PowerStore appliance as additional system write caching. |
PowerStore Manager | An HTML5 management interface for creating storage resources and configuring and scheduling protection of stored data on PowerStore. PowerStore Manager can be used for all management of PowerStore native replication. |
PowerStore node | A storage controller that provides the processing resources for performing storage operations and servicing I/O between storage and hosts. Each PowerStore appliance contains two nodes. |
PowerStoreOS | The PowerStore Operating System |
PowerStore T model | Container-based storage system that is running on purpose-built hardware. This storage system supports unified (block and file) workloads, or block-optimized workloads. |
PowerStore X model | Container-based storage system that runs inside a virtual machine that is deployed on a VMware hypervisor. Besides offering block-optimized workloads, PowerStore also allows you to deploy applications directly on the array. |
Rancher | A multi-cloud, multi-cluster management platform for Kubernetes |
Rancher UI | An HTML management interface for Rancher |
RKE2 | Rancher Kubernetes Engine 2 is a fully conformant Kubernetes distribution focused on security and compliance. |
SCM | Storage-class memory, also known as persistent memory, is an extremely fast storage technology supported by the PowerStore appliance. |
Snapshot | A point-in-time view of data that is stored on a storage resource. You can recover files from a snapshot, restore a storage resource from a snapshot, or provide access to a host. |
Storage container | A VMware term for a logical entity that consists of one or more capability profiles and their storage limits. This entity is known as a vVol datastore when it is mounted in vSphere. |
Thin clone | A read/write copy of a thin block storage resource (volume, volume group, or vSphere VMFS datastore) that shares blocks with the parent resource. |
User snapshot | Snapshot that is created manually by the user or by a protection policy with an associated snapshot rule. This snapshot type is different from an internal snapshot, which is taken automatically by the system with asynchronous replication. |
Secure Snapshot | A special type of snapshot that users cannot delete manually. |
VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) | A VMware storage framework that allows VM data to be stored on individual vVols. This ability allows for data services to be applied at a VM-level of granularity and according to Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM). vVols can also refer to the individual storage objects that are used to enable this functionality. |
Volume | A PowerStore block-level storage device that can be shared using various storage protocols. |