The following figure shows the design of the system architecture:

Figure 16.               Solution architecture

The PowerFlex family of products enable organizations to consume PowerFlex to best meet their business goals and needs.

PowerFlex rack is a rack-scale engineered system, with integrated networking, that enables customers to achieve the scalability and management requirements of a modern data center. This turnkey system allows businesses to reduce cost and risk by buying versus building an infrastructure platform that can run both traditional and emerging business applications or deploy cloud-native applications.

The PowerFlex rack is a software-defined storage platform designed to deliver flexibility, elasticity, and simplicity with predictable performance and resiliency at scale by combining compute as well as high performance storage resources in a managed unified network. This rack-scale engineered system, with integrated networking, enables customers to achieve the scalability and management requirements of a modern data center.

The PowerFlex rack comes preinstalled with integrated top-of-rack (ToR), aggregation, and out of band (OOB) management switches to provide optimal network traffic flow. The PowerFlex is designed using Cisco Nexus aggregation switches that provide 10/40 GbE IP uplink connectivity to the external network for superior performance. Often, network bottlenecks can limit the scale of an HCI system. The 10/25 GbE ToR switches in the rack eliminate these restrictions and provide a path for future growth.

The PowerFlex appliance is a fully integrated appliance that enables customers to achieve the scalability and management requirements of a modern data center. This turnkey system allows businesses to reduce cost and complexity with an easy to manage, purpose-built solution. PowerFlex reduces the risk involved in buying versus building an infrastructure platform that can run both traditional and emerging business applications or deploy cloud-native applications.

The VxFlex Ready Nodes support bringing together industry leading PowerEdge servers with PowerFlex in ascalable, reliable, and highly configurable building block. Customers can choose to deploy VxFlex Ready Nodes in a two-layer model, as storage only or in an HCI/single-layer architecture. No matter what configuration they choose, VxFlex Ready Nodes can fit within their existing infrastructure. PowerFlex Manager is not available as part of the VxFlex Ready Node offer.