Dell EMC PowerScale all-flash storage platforms, powered by the PowerScale OneFS operating system, provide a powerful yet simple scale-out storage architecture to speed access to massive amounts of unstructured data, while dramatically reducing cost and complexity. With a highly dense design that contains four nodes within a single 4U chassis, PowerScale all-flash delivers extreme performance and efficiency for your most demanding unstructured data applications and workloads – including ADAS/AD. The Dell EMC PowerScale family includes four all-flash nodes recommended for DL workloads:
- PowerScale F200: Provides the performance of flash storage in a cost-effective form factor to address the needs of a wide variety of workloads. Each node allows you to scale raw storage capacity from 3.84 TB to 15.36 TB per node and up to 3.8 PB of raw capacity per cluster. The F200 includes in-line compression and deduplication. The minimum number of PowerScale nodes per cluster is three while the maximum cluster size is 252 nodes.
- PowerScale F600: With NVMe flash drives, the F600 provides larger capacity with massive performance in a cost-effective compact form factor to power the most demanding workloads. Each node allows you to scale raw storage capacity from 15.36 TB to 61.4 TB per node and up to 15.48 PB of raw storage per cluster. The F600 includes inline software data compression and deduplication. The minimum number of nodes per cluster is three while the maximum cluster size is 252 nodes.
- PowerScale F800: Provides massive performance and capacity and delivers up to 250,000 IOPS and 15 GB/s aggregate throughput in a single chassis configuration and up to 15.75M IOPS and 945 GB/s of aggregate throughput in configurations of up to a 252-nodes cluster. Each chassis houses 60 SSDs with a capacity choice of 1.6 TB, 3.2 TB, 3.84 TB, 7.68 TB, or 15.36 TB per drive. This allows you to scale raw storage capacity from 96 TB to 924 TB in a single 4U chassis and up to 58 PB in a single cluster.
- PowerScale F810: Provides massive performance and capacity along with inline data compression and deduplication capabilities to deliver extreme efficiency. The F810 delivers up to 250,000 IOPS and 15 GB/s aggregate throughput in a single chassis configuration and up to 15.75M IOPS and 945 GB/s of aggregate throughput in a 252-node cluster. Each F810 chassis houses 60 SSDs with a capacity choice of 3.84 TB, 7.68 TB, or 15.36 TB per drive. This allows you to scale raw storage capacity from 230 TB to 924 TB in a 4U chassis and up to 58 PB of raw storage in a single cluster. Depending on your specific dataset and workload, F810 inline data compression and deduplication delivers up to a 3:1 reduction in storage requirements, this increasing the effective capacity up to 138 PB per cluster. For more information, see the document PowerScale All-Flash Scale-Out NAS Specification Sheet.
Figure 2. Dell EMC Isilon F800/F810
Dell EMC PowerScale families have the following features to benefit DL:
- Low latency, high throughput, and massively parallel I/O for AI. This shortens time for training and testing analytical models on data sets from tens of TB to hundreds of PB on AI platforms such as TensorFlow, SparkML, Caffe, or proprietary AI platforms. Isilon F810/F800 performance characters are:
- Up to 250,000 file IOPS per chassis, up to 15.75M IOPS per cluster
- Up to 15 GB/s throughput per chassis, up to 945 GB/s per cluster
- 230 TB to 924 TB raw flash capacity per chassis; up to 58 PB per cluster (All-Flash)
- The ability to run AI in-place on data using multi-protocol access. Most data used for DL training is also used for other workloads, like HiL and SiL validation. These workloads, which use captured sensor data, typically require lower cost hybrid storage, such as Isilon H5600 but in one PowerScale cluster. This eliminates the need to migrate/copy data and results over to a separate AI stack. Organizations can perform DL and run other IT apps on same data already on PowerScale by adding PowerScale all-flash nodes to the existing cluster.
- Multi-protocol support such as SMB, NFS, HTTP, and native HDFS to maximize operational flexibility
- Enterprise grade features out-of-box. This enables organizations to manage AI data throughout the lifecycle of the ADAS project with minimal cost and risk, while protecting data and meeting regulatory requirements.
- Enterprise data protection and resiliency
- Robust security options
- Economical, long-term archival with fast recovery
- Data Management System (DMS) using a single pane of glass
- Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver for provisioning of persistent storage
- Ansible Module to automate and orchestrate configuration and management (link)
- Extreme scale support. Organizations can achieve AI at scale in a cost-effective manner by leveraging PowerScale for DL as well as other ADAS workflows. Enabling them to handle multi-petabyte data sets with high resolution content and high performance without the need to re-architect their data center, and/or performance degradation.
- Seamlessly tier between all flash, hybrid, and archive nodes via SmartPools
- Grow-as-you-go scalability with up to 58 PB capacity per cluster
- Up to 252 nodes may be connected to form a single cluster with a single namespace and a single coherent cache
- Data Management solutions spanning multiple clusters for Exabyte scale
- Depending on your specific dataset and workload, F810 inline data compression and deduplication delivers up to a 3:1 reduction in storage requirements, this increasing the effective capacity up to 138 PB per cluster