Home > Storage > PowerFlex > White Papers > Google Distributed Cloud Virtual with Dell PowerFlex and Data Protection using PowerProtect Data Manager > Logical architecture of PowerFlex two-layer deployment
The following diagram shows the logical architecture of the GDC Virtual cluster that is deployed on a two-layer PowerFlex cluster setup. In this solution, there are four nodes that are dedicated for storage-only (SDS) and three nodes that are dedicated for compute-only (SDC). A single protection domain is created from the four storage nodes, and a single storage pool is created within this protection domain from which persistent storage volumes can be provisioned for attachment to Kubernetes pods. This architecture is suitable for environments where the storage and compute capacities are decoupled, such as high-performance applications, or for rapidly growing storage capacity requirements.