Let’s Talk File (#1) – PowerStore File Overview
Mon, 21 Mar 2022 14:15:46 -0000
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Introduction
Our customers have a wide variety of traditional and modern workloads. Each of these workloads connects to the underlying infrastructure using various networking protocols. PowerStore’s single architecture for block, file, and vVols uses the latest technologies to achieve these disparate objectives without sacrificing the cost-effective nature of midrange storage. PowerStore provides the ultimate workload flexibility and enables IT to simplify and consolidate infrastructure.
PowerStore features a native file solution that is highly scalable, efficient, performance-focused, and flexible. In this new series, we’ll visit the vast world of PowerStore file and review the comprehensive set of features that it offers. Over the course of this series, we’ll cover everything from NAS servers, file systems, quotas, snapshots and thin clones, protocols, multiprotocol, directory services, and more. We’ll start with the basics before diving in deeper, so no previous file experience or knowledge is required!
File Overview
Let’s start with a quick and high-level overview of file. File-level storage is a storage type where files are shared across a network to a group of heterogeneous clients. It is also known as Network-Attached Storage (NAS). File-level storage is widely used across small and medium-sized businesses to large enterprises across the world. If you’ve ever connected to a shared drive such as a home directory or departmental share, then you’ve used file-level storage before.
PowerStore File
File functionality is natively available on PowerStore T model appliances that are configured in Unified mode. There are no extra pieces of software, hardware, or licenses required to enable this functionality. All file management, monitoring, and provisioning capabilities are available in the HTML5-based PowerStore Manager.
Within an appliance, both nodes are used for both file as well as block. This configuration creates a fully redundant and active/active architecture where both nodes are used to serve file data simultaneously. This design provides the ability to load balance across both nodes while also ensuring high availability.
PowerStore supports the following file access protocols:
- Server Message Block (SMB) – Primarily used by Windows clients for SMB shares
- Network File System (NFS) – Primarily used by UNIX clients for NFS exports
- File Transfer Protocol (FTP) – Used by all clients for file transfers
- SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) – Used by all clients for secure file transfers
PowerStore File Systems
PowerStore features a 64-bit file system architecture that is designed to be highly scalable, efficient, performant, and flexible. PowerStore also includes a rich supporting file feature set to ensure that the data is secure, protected, and can be easily monitored.
PowerStore file systems are also tuned and optimized for high performance. In addition, platform components such as Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) drives and dual-socket CPUs enable the system to maintain low response times while servicing large workloads.
The maturity and robustness of the PowerStore file system combined with these supporting features enables it to be used in many file-level storage use cases, such as departmental shares or home directories.
Conclusion
With the native file capabilities available on PowerStore, administrators can easily implement a file solution that is designed for the modern data center. Throughout this blog series, we’ll review how quick and easy it is to configure file in your data center.
Now that we have an overview of file, we can begin jumping into more specific technical details. Stay tuned for the next blog in this series where we’ll start by looking at NAS servers and their role in facilitating access to the data residing on the file systems.
Resources
Author: Wei Chen, Senior Principal Engineering Technologist