PowerFlex software-defined storage, empowers organizations to harness the power of software, so they can embrace change while achieving consistent predictable outcomes.
PowerFlex is designed to deliver flexibility, elasticity, and simplicity with predictable performance and resiliency at scale, by combining compute and high-performance storage resources in a managed unified fabric.
In addition to delivering high-performance block storage with rich data services, PowerFlex offers simple yet comprehensive tool-set for IT operations and lifecycle management of the entire infrastructure, helping automate infrastructure workflows.
PowerFlex software components are installed on the application servers and communicate via a standard LAN to handle the application I/O requests sent to PowerFlex block volumes. An extremely efficient decentralized block I/O flow, combined with a distributed, sliced volume layout, results in a massively parallel I/O system that can scale up to thousands of nodes.
PowerFlex software components are:
- Meta Data Manager (MDM)—Configures and monitors the system. The MDM can be configured in redundant cluster mode, with three members. MDMs are installed on the controller nodes providing high availability and redundancy.
- Storage Data Server (SDS)—Manages the capacity of a single server and acts as a back-end for data access. The SDSs are installed on the Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes.
- Storage Data Client (SDC)—A lightweight device driver that exposes PowerFlex volumes as block devices to the application that resides on the same server on which the SDC is installed. SDCs are installed on the compute nodes for providing volume access to the instances and also on the controllers to enable Glance to access the volumes.
- Storage Data Replication (SDR)—SDR are not supported nor tested in Dell EMC Ready Architecture for Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16.1-Flex.
Another important component which is critical for PowerFlex users in an OpenStack environment is the PowerFlex Gateway. The gateway is utilized for configuration updates, deployment and various lifecycle management activities, but also acts as an endpoint for API calls (passed to the MDM) made through the Cinder driver over HTTPS.
A graphical user interface, also known as the PowerFlex dashboard, is installed as a VM on the Solution Admin Host. Please do not run the PowerFlex dashboard for any storage configuration to avoid bypassing Cinder control. Instead, monitor and analyze Key performance indicators (KPIs) in the PowerFlex dashboard. Dell EMC PowerFlex Cinder driver gateway is deployed as a VM on the Solution Admin Host PowerFlex interface with Cinder through API calls.