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Dell EMC Isilon is the leading scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) platform and offers the right blend of performance and capacity to support a wide range of unstructured data workloads including high-performance computing (HPC), file shares, home directories, archives, media content, video surveillance, and in-place data analytics. Isilon offers all-flash, hybrid, and archive storage systems that can be combined into a single cluster. All Isilon models are powered by the Isilon OneFS operating system. With its modular hardware design, Isilon solutions scale easily from tens of terabytes to tens of petabytes in a single cluster.
The OneFS operating system uses a single volume, single namespace, single file system architecture, making Isilon storage systems simple to install, manage, and scale. And with automated, policy-based management options including data protection, replication, load-balancing, storage tiering, and cloud integration, Isilon solutions remain simple to manage no matter how large the data environment becomes.
All nodes work together as peers in the cluster, leaving no single point of failure. As nodes are added, OneFS expands dynamically and redistributes data, eliminating the work of partitioning disks and creating volumes. Additionally, OneFS ensures that the workloads are dynamically reassigned when a failure occurs. This is achieved using the OneFS SmartConnect feature.
Figure 1. Isilon Scale-Out NAS
The Isilon Scale-out NAS utilizes Dell EMC Networking Ethernet switches to provide the network. Dell EMC Networking OS9 and OS10 Enterprise Edition (OS10EE) are used in the provided examples. OS10EE is a native Linux-based network operating system that has a fully disaggregated software architecture. OS10EE decouples the base software from the Layer 2 and Layer 3 protocol stack and services, which enables open programmability and portability. This allows for greater utilization of Dell EMC’s Open Networking, and this guide utilizes Dell EMC Networking operating systems.
Dell EMC Networking's legacy OS9 is still prevalent in the industry and supported on a large cross-section of the currently shipping portfolio. This document encompasses the use of both operating systems within the same network architecture.
The Dell EMC S4048-ON is used as leaf switches, and the Dell EMC Z9100-ON is used as a spine switch. The Dell EMC S3048-ON is used as a management switch for the iDRAC connections and out-of-band switch management, as well as the external Isilon connections. The Z9100-ON and S4048-ON leaf pair in rack 1 utilize Dell EMC Networking OS10EE, whereas the S3048-ON and S4048-ON leaf pair in rack 2 utilize OS9.
This guide demonstrates how to utilize Dell EMC Networking, Dell EMC PowerEdge R730xd servers, and the flexibility of Dell EMC Isilon OneFS in two separate topologies. The examples provided use the Isilon X210. However, all Isilon storage systems utilize OneFS. This allows the steps outlined in this guide to be used regardless of the hardware available.
The first example highlights the benefits of using the dynamic routing protocol Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) in a leaf/spine environment. This is followed up with an example that displays the configuration and benefits of a Layer 2 leaf/spine topology.
While the steps in this document were validated using the specified Dell EMC Networking switches and operating systems, they may be leveraged for other Dell EMC Networking switch models utilizing the same networking OS version or later, assuming the switch has the available port numbers, speeds, and types.
Note: For more specific details on deploying a spine-leaf architecture using Dell EMC Networking, refer to Leaf-Spine Deployment and Best Practices Guide and Dell EMC Networking Layer 3 Leaf-Spine Deployment and Best Practices with OS10.
In addition to covering the details of the network configuration, specific configurations within OneFS are discussed. The focus is on the front-end networking configurations, as the back-end network that Isilon utilizes is beyond the scope of this guide. The main configurations that are discussed within Isilon's OneFS are as follows: