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The three layers of the traditional storage model—file system, volume manager, and data protection—have evolved over time to suit the needs of small-scale storage architectures but introduce significant complexity and are not well adapted to petabyte-scale systems. The OneFS operating system replaces all of these, providing a unifying clustered file system with integrated scalable data protection, and obviating the need for volume management. OneFS is a fundamental building block for scale-out infrastructures, allowing for massive scale and tremendous efficiency, and is used to power all Dell PowerScale NAS storage solutions.
Crucially, OneFS is designed to scale not just in terms of machines, but also in human terms—allowing large-scale systems to be managed with a fraction of the personnel required for traditional storage systems. OneFS eliminates complexity and incorporates self-healing and self-managing functionality that dramatically reduces the burden of storage management. OneFS also incorporates parallelism at a very deep level of the operating system, such that virtually every key system service is distributed across multiple units of hardware. This allows OneFS to scale in virtually every dimension as the infrastructure is expanded, ensuring that what works today will continue to work as the dataset grows.
OneFS is a fully symmetric file system with no single point of failure — taking advantage of clustering not just to scale performance and capacity, but also to allow for any-to-any failover and multiple levels of redundancy that go far beyond the capabilities of RAID. The trend for disk subsystems has been slowly increasing performance while rapidly increasing storage densities. OneFS responds to this reality by scaling the amount of redundancy as well as the speed of failure repair. This allows OneFS to grow to multi-petabyte scale while providing greater reliability than small, traditional storage systems.
PowerScale hardware provides the appliance on which OneFS runs. Hardware components are best-of-breed, but commodity-based — ensuring the benefits of commodity hardware’s ever-improving cost and efficiency curves. OneFS allows hardware to be incorporated or removed from the cluster at will and at any time, abstracting the data and applications away from the hardware. Data is given infinite longevity, protected from the vicissitudes of evolving hardware generations. The cost and pain of data migrations and hardware refreshes are eliminated.
OneFS is ideally suited for file-based and unstructured “big data” applications in enterprise environments including large-scale home directories, file shares, archives, virtualization, and business analytics. As such, OneFS is widely used in many data-intensive industries today, including energy, financial services, Internet and hosting services, business intelligence, engineering, manufacturing, media and entertainment, bioinformatics, scientific research, and other high-performance computing environments.