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Both PowerMax 2500 and 8500 series arrays are designed with a multi-node active-active scale out architecture using industry standard, end-to-end NVMe components. This gives direct access across the system from any node.
The system components of this active-active architecture are:
The dynamic dual fabric using new internal NVMe-oF topologies, featuring NVMe/RDMA using 100GbE InfiniBand (NVMe/IB) and NVMe/PCIe fabrics, allows the compute and backend storage elements to exist as independent end points on a large internal storage area network. These individual compute and storage endpoints can be placed into shared logical and physical resource pools, to disaggregate the storage and compute resources in the system.
In this active-active architecture, all node endpoints can access all storage endpoints in the DMEs, using the system’s high speed NVMe-oF topologies, coupled with Mellanox Bluefield SoC (system on chip) that supports hardware accelerated NVMe-oF directly to NVMe drives. This creates an ‘any to any’ node/drive access, making the platform a true active/active and a share everything system design.
The redundant InfiniBand Virtual Matrix allows the directors to communicate with each other directly.
The directors are operating in parallel on separate tasks, making PowerMax a Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) system (up to 576 CPU cores).
It also allows the emulation code on each director to access memory on all other directors, forming a single global memory address space.
The memory on the other directors is addressable but slightly slower, making this a Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) system.
Connections over InfiniBand have a latency of around 0.7us.
Note: Dynamic Fabric on PowerMax2500 is added with the addition of second node pair, with no fabric modules in single node pair systems. Fabric modules are cross connected (PCIe) within the node pair of a PowerMax2500, with drives PCIe attached with RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) access through fabric modules.