PowerFlex rack is an engineered system designed to meet the customer's modern data center needs. Customers have flexibility in deploying their PowerFlex system in flexible compute and storage resources in the following deployment options.
- Hyperconverged: compute and storage in same chassis allowing proportional scale.
- Two layer: compute and storage deployed in separate chassis allowing independent scale of compute and storage resources
- Storage only: only storage resources are part of PowerFlex rack. Compute resides outside the system boundaries
- Mixed/Hybrid: combination of two or more of the deployment options
Figure 2. PowerFlex flexible deployment options
PowerFlex allows for block and file storage within the same system. A PowerFlex system consists of the following components:
- Storage Data Server (SDS): The storage data server is installed on every PowerFlex node that contributes its storage to the system. The storage data server abstracts local storage, maintains storage pools, and presents volumes to the storage data clients. SDS is installed on servers contributing local storage to the cluster.
- Storage Data Client (SDC): The storage data client (SDC) is installed on PowerFlex nodes that consume the system storage volumes. The storage data client provides front-end volume access to applications and file systems. It is installed on servers consuming storage and maintains peer-to-peer connections to every storage data server managing a pool of storage.
- Meta Data Manager (MDM): The metadata manager software is installed on three or five PowerFlex nodes and forms a cluster that supervises the operations of the entire cluster and its parts, while staying outside of the data path itself. The metadata manager oversees storage cluster configurations, monitoring, rebalances, and rebuilds. It is highly available, independent cluster installed on three or five different PowerFlex nodes. It sits outside the data path.
PowerFlex rack offers the following four types of node configurations to meet performance, scale, and storage and compute capacity business requirement.
- PowerFlex hyperconverged nodes
- PowerFlex compute-only nodes
- PowerFlex storage-only nodes
- PowerFlex file nodes