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Dell PowerScale: Accelerator Nodes Overview and General Best Practices
Executive summary
Overview
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PowerScale accelerator nodes Design considerations PowerScale accelerator node monitoring Conclusion References

Overview

Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Storage (general) > Dell PowerScale: Accelerator Nodes Overview and General Best Practices > Overview

Overview

  • Organizations are seeing the accelerated growth of unstructured data being created, stored, and consumed. Customers need their scale-out NAS storage not only to support their existing workloads but to be prepared for unanticipated upcoming demands. To future-proof their storage, customers need to address the performance, capacity, protection, efficiency, security, and manageability of their data and storage system. Ultimately, to maximize business value, customers need flexibility and choice .

    Dell PowerScale clusters can linearly expand or scale out performance, capacity, or both, seamlessly growing the existing file system into petabytes of capacity. In addition, with the flexibility of OneFS, different node types (all-flash, hybrid, archive) can be mixed in a single cluster.

    Dell PowerScale all-flash and all-NVMe storage deliver the necessary performance to meet demanding workloads. If additional capabilities are required, new nodes can be nondisruptively added to the cluster to provide both performance and capacity. There may be specialized compute-bound workloads that require extra performance but do not need any additional capacity. These types of workloads may benefit from the addition of the PowerScale P100 performance accelerator node to the cluster. The accelerator node contributes CPU, memory, and network bandwidth capabilities to the cluster. This accelerated storage solution delivers incremental performance at a lower cost.

    Due to rapid data growth, organizations are challenged by shrinking backup windows that affect business productivity and the ability to meet IT requirements for tape backup and compliance archiving. In such an environment, providing fast, efficient, and reliable data protection is essential. Customers are concerned about their backup windows and the ability to meet the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Given the 24x7 nature of the business, a high-performance backup solution delivers the performance and scale to address the SLAs of the business. The addition of one or more PowerScale B100 backup accelerator nodes to a PowerScale cluster reduces the risk while addressing backup protection needs.

    Dell PowerScale OneFS 9.3 introduces support for the latest release of accelerator nodes—the PowerScale P100 performance accelerator and the PowerScale B100 backup accelerator. This document provides an overview of both accelerator types and best practices for deploying them. Both accelerator types provide a simple and flexible solution to address the above-described challenges and provide incremental performance for specific workflows, and to meet defined backup windows.