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Global Namespace Acceleration (GNA) is an unlicensed, configurable component of SmartPools. GNA’s principal goal is to help accelerate metadata read operations (for example, filename lookups) by keeping a copy of the cluster’s metadata on high-performance, low-latency SSD media. See Figure 10. GNA allows customers to increase the performance of certain workloads across the whole file system without having to purchase or upgrade SSDs for every node in the cluster. With GNA, an extra mirror of metadata from storage pools that do not contain SSDs is stored on SSDs available anywhere else in the cluster, regardless of node pool boundaries. The extra mirror accelerates metadata read operations even for data on node pools that have no SSDs.
The purpose of GNA is to accelerate the performance of metadata-intensive applications and workloads such as home directories, workflows with heavy enumeration, and activities requiring many comparisons. Examples of metadata-read-heavy workflows exist across most of Dell’s established and emerging scale-out NAS markets. In some, such as EDA, for example, such workloads are dominant, and the use of SSDs to provide the performance they require is ubiquitous.
Note: Since all the current PowerScale node platforms now contain some quantity of SSD, Global Namespace Acceleration is becoming more of a legacy feature.