The PowerMaxOS iSCSI target model has been designed to meet customer demands regarding control and isolation of resources, as well as providing a platform for greater physical port utilization and efficiencies. The PowerMaxOS iSCSI target model accomplishes this by the following key design principles:
- PowerMaxOS groups director CPU resources (cores) together into logical pools. Each director dynamically allocates these pooled CPU resources to meet the workload demands placed upon the different types of front end and back-end connectivity options the director supports. These connectivity options and the resources they use are called “emulation instances.” PowerMaxOS supports iSCSI using the “SE instance.” A PowerMax director can have only one SE instance. The SE instance is dynamically allocated a certain number of cores, which are used to process the total amount of TCP traffic coming in through the director’s 10/25 GbE ports.
- Virtualization of the physical port. Users can create multiple iSCSI target nodes and IP interfaces for an individual port, which provides:
- Individual iSCSI targets can be assigned one or more IP interfaces, which define access network paths for hosts to reach the target node.
- The implementation supports configuration of routing and VLANs for traffic isolation.
- Storage side Quality of Service (QoS) is implemented at storage group (SG) level using host I/O limits and PowerMaxOS service levels.
Note: PowerMaxOS supports Ethernet PAUSE flow control; however, priority flow control (PFC) and data center bridging (DCB) are not supported.