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In terms of planning for per-user overhead on a PowerScale storage cluster, the following guidelines typify most use cases. They are not intended as a definitive rule for all environments, so Dell recommends validating the individual requirements and profile characteristics of the specific environment prior to committing to a particular PowerScale storage cluster design or configuration.
Generally, network-throughput and disk-throughput rates are more a function of the type of workload and the specific use case in effect on a given storage cluster rather than the network protocol in use. The per-user overhead placed on the other components of a PowerScale storage cluster—including CPU, memory, and network bandwidth—is more directly a result of which file-services protocol is in use. File services based on SMB client connections typically require a higher amount of overhead per user than do comparable workloads from NFS clients, particularly NFS v3. The exact footprint per user varies by environment, configuration and workload characteristics.
The differences in per-user overhead between NFS and SMB connection protocols may require changes in the PowerScale storage cluster design to ensure that cluster resources are sufficient to meet the overall performance targets for the appropriate protocol.