Let’s Talk File (#3) – PowerStore File Systems
Wed, 24 Apr 2024 17:05:59 -0000
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Introduction
A file system is a storage resource that holds data and can be accessed through file sharing protocols such as SMB or NFS. The PowerStore file system architecture is designed to be highly scalable, efficient, performance-focused, and flexible. PowerStore offers a 64-bit file system that is mature and robust, enabling it to be used in many of the traditional NAS file use cases.
File system highlights
PowerStore file systems can accommodate large amounts of data, directories, and files. Each individual file system is designed to scale up to 256TB in size, hold 10 million subdirectories per directory, and store 32 billion files. Don’t forget that PowerStore can support up to 500 file systems on an appliance as well!
All file systems are thinly provisioned and always have compression and deduplication enabled. This means that capacity is allocated on demand as capacity is consumed on the file system. In addition, compression and deduplication help reduce the total cost of ownership and increase the efficiency of the system by reducing the amount of physical capacity that is needed to store the data. Savings are not only limited to the file system itself, but also to its snapshots and thin clones. Compression and deduplication occur inline between the system cache and the backend drives. The compression task is offloaded to a dedicated chip on the node, which frees up CPU cycles.
PowerStore file systems are tuned and optimized for high performance across all use cases. In addition, platform components such as Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) drives and high-speed connectivity options enable the system to maintain low response times while servicing large workloads.
How to provision a file system
Now that you understand the benefits of the PowerStore file system, let’s review the file system provisioning process. PowerStore Manager makes it quick and simple to provision a file system, create NFS exports and/or SMB shares, configure access, and apply a protection policy using a single wizard.
To create a file system, open PowerStore Manager and navigate to Storage > File Systems > Create. The file system creation wizard prompts you for the information displayed in the following table.
Name | Description |
NAS Server | Select the NAS server that will be used to access this file system, ensuring the necessary protocols are enabled on the NAS server for client access. |
Name | Provide a name for the file system. |
Size | Specify the size of the file system that is presented to the client, between 3GB and 256TB. |
NFS Export (Optional) | Only displayed if NFS is enabled on the NAS server. Provide a name for the NFS export if NFS access is desired. The NFS Export Path is displayed so you can easily mount the NFS export on the client. |
Configure Access | Only displayed if an NFS export is created. This screen has the following settings:
|
SMB Share (Optional) | Only displayed if SMB is enabled on the NAS server. This screen has the following settings:
|
Protection Policy | Select a protection policy to protect the file system. |
The following screenshot shows an example of the summary page when creating a new file system. In this example, we provisioned the file system, NFS export, SMB share, configured host access, and applied a protection policy to the file system.
If you’re testing file for the first time, you may want to start off with deploying a basic minimum configuration. To do this, all you need to choose is a NAS server, configure a file system name, specify a size, and create either an NFS export or an SMB share. If you enable NFS, you’ll also need to enable host access to your client.
When the file system and NFS export or SMB share is provisioned, you now mount the file system on to your host for access:
- SMB: \\<SMB_Server>\<SMB_Share_Name>
- For example: \\nas\fs
- NFS: mount <NFS_Server>:/<NFS_Export_Name> /<Mountpoint>
- For example: mount nas:/fs /mnt
File system management
PowerStore file systems provide increased flexibility by providing the ability to shrink and extend file systems as needed. Shrink and extend operations are used to resize the file system and update the capacity that is seen by the client. Extend operations do not change how much capacity is allocated to the file system. However, shrink operations may be able to reclaim unused space, depending on how much capacity is allocated to the file system and the presence of snapshots or thin clones.
If the advertised file system size is too small or full, extending it allows additional data to be written to the file system. If the advertised file system size is too large, shrinking it limits the amount of data that can be written to the file system. For shrink and extend, the minimum value is equal to the used size of the file system; the maximum value is 256 TB. You cannot shrink the file system to less than the used size, because this would cause the client to see the file system as more than 100% full.
The following figure shows the file system properties page in PowerStore Manager, where you can shrink or extend a file system.
File system performance metrics
Performance metrics are available to view the latency, IOPS, bandwidth, and IO size at the file system level. You can tweak the timeline to view preset timeframes ranging from the last hour to the last 2 years, or drag and zoom in to specific sections of the graph. You can also export the metrics to file types such as PNG, PDF, JPEG, or CSV.
File-specific metrics are also available at the node, cluster, and appliance level. At the node level, SMB and NFS protocol metrics can also be viewed. The available metrics are:
- Read, Write, and Total IOPS
- Read, Write, and Total Bandwidth
- Read, Write, and Average Latency
- Read, Write, and Average IO Size
The following figure shows the file metrics page that displays the NFS protocol metrics on Node A.
Conclusion
Congratulations! You have successfully provisioned a file system, NFS export, SMB share, and accessed it from a host. Now you can write files and folders or run workloads on the file system. We also reviewed how to leverage shrink and extend to update the file system size, and looked at some of the performance metrics so you can monitor your file systems. Stay tuned for the next blog in this series where we’ll take a deeper dive into the SMB protocol.
Resources
Author: Wei Chen, Senior Principal Engineering Technologist