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PowerFlex software-defined infrastructure enables broad consolidation across the data center, encompassing almost any type of workload and architecture. The software-defined architecture offers automation and programmability of the complete infrastructure and provides scalability, performance, and resiliency to enable effortless adherence to stringent workload Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
The PowerFlex family provides a foundation that combines compute and high-performance storage resources in a managed unified fabric. PowerFlex comes in flexible deployment options (rack, appliance, or custom nodes and in the public cloud) that enables independent (two-layer), HCI (single-layer), or mixed architectures. PowerFlex is ideal for high-performance applications and databases, building an agile private/hybrid cloud, or consolidating resources in heterogeneous environments.
Figure 1. PowerFlex family
PowerFlex software components
Software is the key differentiation in the PowerFlex offering. PowerFlex software components provide software-defined storage services and also help simplify infrastructure management and orchestration. This software enables comprehensive IT Operational Management (ITOM) and Life Cycle Management (LCM) capabilities that span compute and storage infrastructure, from BIOS and Firmware to nodes, software, and networking.
PowerFlex is the software foundation of PowerFlex software-defined infrastructure. It is a scale-out block and file storage service that is designed to deliver flexibility, elasticity, and simplicity with predictable high performance and resiliency at scale.
PowerFlex Manager is the software component in PowerFlex family that enables ITOM automation and LCM capabilities for PowerFlex systems. Starting with PowerFlex 4.0, the unified PowerFlex Manager brings together three separate components used in previous releases: PowerFlex Manager, the core PowerFlex UI, and the PowerFlex gateway. The new PowerFlex UI runs in Kubernetes and embraces a modern development framework.
PowerFlex File Controllers, also known as File Nodes, are physical nodes that enable PowerFlex software-defined File Services. They host the Network-Attached Storage (NAS) Servers, which in turn host the tenant namespaces and file systems, mapping PowerFlex volumes to the file systems presented by the NAS Servers. All major protocols are supported, such as NFS, SMB/CIFS, FTP, and NDMP. PowerFlex deployment architectures
PowerFlex software-defined infrastructure excels in deployment flexibility. PowerFlex can be deployed in a two-layer (independent compute and storage layers), single-layer (Hyperconverged Infrastructure, or HCI), or a mixture of the two architectures (Mixed).
Figure 2. PowerFlex deployment architectures
Independent architecture
In an independent architecture, or two-layer architecture, some nodes provide storage capacity for applications data while other separate and independent nodes provide compute resources for applications and workloads. Compute and storage resources can be scaled independently by adding nodes to the cluster while it remains active. This separation of compute and storage resources can help minimize software licensing costs in certain situations. This architecture is ideal for high-performance databases and application workloads.
In an HCI architecture, each node in the cluster contributes storage and compute resources simultaneously to the applications and workloads. This architecture allows you to scale your infrastructure uniformly with building blocks that add both storage and compute resources. This architecture is appropriate for data center and workload consolidation.
In a mixed architecture, we have a combination of both the HCI and Independent architectures. As shown in Figure 2 there are some storage only nodes, compute only nodes, and HCI nodes that are part of the same PowerFlex cluster. This is a desirable architecture when working with an existing compute infrastructure and adding high-performance software-defined infrastructure. This is also a starting point for a two-layer deployment design when external workloads are migrated to PowerFlex.
PowerFlex rack is a software-defined infrastructure platform that delivers flexibility, elasticity, and simplicity with predictable performance and resiliency at scale by combining compute as well as high-performance storage resources in a managed unified network. This rack-based engineered system, with integrated networking, enables customers to achieve the scalability and management requirements of a modern data center.
PowerFlex appliance is a PowerEdge server which has been configured as a node in a software-defined infrastructure deployment that runs PowerFlex software components. This offering allows customers the flexibility and savings to bring their own compatible networking.
PowerFlex Custom Nodes are validated server building-blocks that are configured for use with PowerFlex. Custom nodes are available with thousands of configuration options and are available for customers who to build their own environments.
PowerFlex software can be deployed in the public cloud and is available in the Amazon Marketplace as PowerFlex cloud storage. PowerFlex on AWS offers the same on-premises benefits of high-performance, linear scalability, and high resilience as in the cloud. PowerFlex also adds cloud-specific benefits, such as large volume sizes, extreme performance based on NVMe drives, and predictable scalability. With PowerFlex on AWS, you can also get higher multi-Availability-Zone (multi-AZ) resiliency when PowerFlex Fault sets are distributed across multiple AWS Availability Zones.