Home > Workload Solutions > High Performance Computing > White Papers > Enhance Availability of Storage Services with an NFS Storage System > Testbed configuration
The testbed used to evaluate the performance and functionality of the Dell Technologies Validated Design for HPC NFS Storage is described here. Note that the CPUs used for performance testing are different from those selected for the solution. That is since pre-release PowerEdge R750 configurations procured for this project had limited processor options, and the desired processor was not available. However, since the known bottleneck of the solution (and previous versions based on PowerVault ME4084) are the storage array controllers, having more cores available is not expected to have any impact on performance results.
Hardware configurations |
|
NFS server model |
Dell EMC PowerEdge R750 servers |
Processor |
2x Intel® Xeon® Gold Platinum 8352Y CPU @ 2.20GHz, 32 cores per processor |
Memory |
16 x 16GiB 3200 MT/s RDIMMs (256 GiB) |
Local disks and RAID controller |
PERC H345 (Front – Embedded). Five 480GB SSD SAS hard drives. Two SSDs in RAID1 for the OS, three SSDs in RAID0 for swap space (xfs_repair uses it after XFS failures). |
Clients Network (data) Adapter |
NVIDIA® ConnectX-6 VPI InfiniBand® HDR100 (slot 6). |
1GbE Ethernet (management and Internal) |
Broadcom® 5720 2-port Gigabit Ethernet LOM board |
External Storage Controllers |
2x 12Gbps SAS HBA355e (slots 2 and 5) |
Systems Management |
iDRAC9 Enterprise |
Power Supply |
Dual redundant power supply units 1100W |
Storage configuration |
|
Storage Enclosure |
1x Dell EMC PowerVault ME4084 enclosure |
RAID controllers |
Duplex RAID controllers included on the Dell EMC PowerVault ME4084 |
Hard Disk Drives |
84x 10TB 7.2K NL SAS HDD drives |
Other components |
|
Private Gigabit Ethernet switch |
PowerSwitch S3048-ON |
Fence Power Distribution Units |
2x APC switched rack PDUs, model AP7921B |
Operating system |
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.3 x86_64 |
Kernel version |
4.18.0-240.el8.x86_64 |
Cluster Suite |
Red Hat Cluster Suite included with RHEL 8.3 |
File system |
Red Hat Scalable File System (XFS) 5.0.0-4 |
Dell Systems Management tool |
Dell EMC OpenManage Server Administrator 10.0.1-4517_A00 |