Software is the key success factor in the PowerFlex offering. 

• PowerFlex software delivers high performance and highly resilient block storage service that can scale to thousands of nodes.
• PowerFlex software components provide SDS services. The software components help to simplify the infrastructure management and orchestration with comprehensive IT Operations Management (ITOM) and life cycle management (LCM) capabilities that span compute and storage infrastructure, from BIOS and firmware to nodes, software, and networking. 

The key PowerFlex software components are:

• Storage Data Client (SDC): Software component that is installed on all compute nodes consuming storage. This component provides front-end volume access to applications and file systems. It maintains a peer-to-peer connection to every Storage Data Server (SDS) that is managing a pool of storage. 
• Storage Data Server (SDS): Software component that is installed on all storage nodes that are contributing storage to the cluster. This component abstracts local direct attached server-based storage, maintains storage pools, and presents volumes to the clients (SDCs). 
• Meta Data Manager (MDM): Software component that is responsible for cluster management services. The MDMs form a cluster within the cluster, operating outside the data path, but co-resident on either 3 or 5 of the nodes running other components. The MDMs oversee storage cluster configurations and monitoring, rebalancing, and rebuild operations.

The following diagram shows the relationship between SDC (C), SDS (S), and MDM (M) within a two-layer PowerFlex architecture:

Figure 2. Relationships between SDC, SDS, and MDM

PowerFlex Manager