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High Availability and Data Protection with Dell PowerScale Scale-Out NAS
Executive summary High availability and reliability at the petabyte scale High availability with OneFS OneFS fault tolerance High availability and data protection strategies
Overview
OneFS high availability and data protection suite
Connection load balancing and failover—SmartConnect
Snapshots
Writable snapshots
SmartDedupe
Small File Storage Efficiency
Inline data reduction
Replication
Archiving and data security
CloudPools
SmartLock
Data Encryption at Rest
Audit
OneFS hardening
Secure Remote Services and SupportAssist
File filtering
Nearline, VTL, and tape backup
FC backup accelerator card
Backup from snapshots
Parallel streams
NDMP
Direct NDMP model
Remote NDMP model
Certified backup applications
Summary OneFS glossary

Connection load balancing and failover—SmartConnect

Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Data Protection > High Availability and Data Protection with Dell PowerScale Scale-Out NAS > Connection load balancing and failover—SmartConnect

Connection load balancing and failover—SmartConnect

  • High availability is at the leading edge of the data protection continuum. This not only includes disk, CPU, and power redundancy, but also network resilience. SmartConnect software contributes to data availability by supporting dynamic NFS failover and failback for Linux and UNIX clients and SMB3 continuous availability for Windows clients. This ensures that when a node failure occurs or preventative maintenance is performed, all in-flight reads and writes are handed off to another node in the cluster to finish its operation without any user or application interruption.

    During failover, clients are evenly redistributed across all remaining nodes in the cluster, ensuring minimal performance impact. If a node is brought down for any reason, including a failure, the virtual IP addresses on that node is seamlessly migrated to another node in the cluster. When the offline node is brought back online, SmartConnect automatically rebalances the NFS and SMB3 clients across the entire cluster to ensure maximum storage and performance utilization. For periodic system maintenance and software updates, this functionality allows for per-node rolling upgrades affording full-availability throughout the duration of the maintenance window.

    To further increase the protection and security of in-flight data, OneFS supports encryption for the SMBv3 protocol version. This can be configured on a per-share, zone, or cluster-wide basis. Only operating systems that support SMB3 encryption can work with encrypted shares. These operating systems can also work with unencrypted shares if the cluster is configured to allow nonencrypted connections. Other operating systems can access non-encrypted shares only if the cluster is configured to allow nonencrypted connections.

    OneFS also supports HDFS transparent data encryption (TDE) for Apache, Cloudera, and Hortonworks Hadoop stacks. Encryption is performed on the client side and can use an external key management server. Data written to and read from these HDFS encryption zones can only be accessed over the HDFS protocol.

    Image depicting seamless client failover with SmartConnect as node three is failed out of a five node cluster.

    Seamless client failover with SmartConnect

    Additional information is available in the OneFS SmartConnect white paper.