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There are two types of networks associated with a cluster: internal and external.
All intra-node communication in a cluster is performed across a dedicated backend network, consisting of either 10 Gb, 40 Gb, or 100 Gb Ethernet, or low-latency QDR InfiniBand (IB). This back-end network, which is configured with redundant switches for high availability, acts as the backplane for the cluster. This enables each node to act as a contributor in the cluster and isolating node-to-node communication to a private, high-speed, low-latency network. This back-end network uses Internet Protocol (IP) for node-to-node communication.
Clients connect to the cluster using Ethernet connections (10 GbE, 25 GbE, 40 GbE, or 100 GbE) that are available on all nodes. Because each node provides its own Ethernet ports, the amount of network bandwidth available to the cluster scales linearly with performance and capacity. A cluster supports standard network communication protocols to a customer network, including NFS, SMB, HTTP, FTP, HDFS, and S3. Also, OneFS provides full integration with both IPv4 and IPv6 environments.
The complete cluster is combined with hardware, software, networks in the following view:
The diagram above depicts the complete architecture; software, hardware, and network all working together in your environment with servers to provide a completely distributed single file system that can scale dynamically as workloads and capacity needs or throughput needs change in a scale-out environment.
OneFS SmartConnect is a load balancer that works at the front-end Ethernet layer to evenly distribute client connections across the cluster. SmartConnect supports dynamic NFS failover and failback for Linux and UNIX clients and SMB3 continuous availability for Windows clients. This ensures that when a node failure occurs, or preventative maintenance is performed, all in-flight reads and writes are handed off to another node in the cluster to finish its operation without any user or application interruption.
During failover, clients are evenly redistributed across all remaining nodes in the cluster, ensuring minimal performance impact. If a node is brought down for any reason, including a failure, the virtual IP addresses on that node are seamlessly migrated to another node in the cluster. When the offline node is brought back online, SmartConnect automatically rebalances the NFS and SMB3 clients across the entire cluster to ensure maximum storage and performance utilization. For periodic system maintenance and software updates, this functionality allows for per-node rolling upgrades affording full-availability throughout the duration of the maintenance window.
Further information is available in the OneFS SmartConnect white paper.