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Two types of networks are associated with a cluster: internal (or backend) and external (or frontend).
All intranode communication in a cluster is performed across a dedicated back-end network, consisting of either 40 GbE or low-latency QDR InfiniBand. The back-end network is configured with redundant switches for high availability and acts as the backplane for the cluster, enabling each node to act as a contributor in the cluster while also isolating node-to-node communication to a private high-speed, low-latency network. The back-end network uses IP for node-to-node communication.
Clients connect to the cluster by using the 10 GbE or 40 GbE Ethernet connections that are available on all nodes. Because each node provides its own Ethernet ports, the amount of network bandwidth that is available to the cluster scales linearly with performance and capacity. The Isilon cluster supports standard network communication protocols to a customer network, including NFS, SMB, HTTP, FTP, HDFS, and OpenStack Swift. Further, the OneFS operating system provides full integration with both IPv4 and IPv6 environments.
Note: Client connections of 1 GbE are not supported in SAP HANA deployments.