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PowerMaxOS 10 is the new PowerMax operating system used for system configuration, monitoring, and management. PowerMax 2500 and 8500 systems consist of modular building blocks called PowerMax nodes. Nodes provide compute, cache, connectivity, and are installed in pairs for redundancy and performance.
The PowerMax 2500 scales from one to two node pairs contained in a 10U rack. It is based on an Intel Cascade Lake 2.8 GHz CPU with 32 cores per node.
The PowerMax 8500 scales from one to eight node pairs in a single-rack footprint. It is based on an Intel Cascade Lake 3.9 GHz CPU with 36 cores per node.
In addition, the DRAM in PowerMax systems is now primarily dedicated to user data. Most of the metadata, which is used for tracking allocations of thin volumes and replication, is now created in nonvolatile memory. This design allows the faster DRAM to serve user I/Os and removes the need to vault (save) metadata during power outages.
PowerMax systems offer up to 16 front-end ports per node and three types of front-end modules. Each node can have one to four modules. For open systems, these modules include:
The PowerMax backend uses a dynamic media enclosure (DME) for the fabric-attached storage media. It is fully NVMe-based, where the drives are Self-Encrypting Drives (SEDs) for data security. The drives are set in Flexible RAID, providing a new pooled data storage capacity. Flexible RAID balances the same physical capacity per drive with RAID options of RAID 1 (mirroring), RAID 5 (8+1 and 12+1), and RAID 6 (12+2). RAID 5 (4+1) is available for PowerMax 2500 systems with minimal capacity.
PowerMax dynamic fabric uses RDMA over 100 Gb NVMe interconnect, providing full connectivity between nodes and DMEs.
PowerMaxOS 10 introduces a new 64-bit file with multiprotocol file sharing (NFS 3.0, 4.0/4.1, and CIFS/SMB 3.0) and multiple file server identities (CIFS and NFS servers).
For more information on PowerMax local and remote replication, see Appendix 1. PowerMax replication.
For more information about the PowerMax architecture and features, see the following documents: