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Traditionally, Helix Core servers required block storage attached directly to them, such as internal drives, Fibre Channel SAN, or direct-attached SAS disk trays. This requirement meant that, in a typical “scale-up” way, the entire environment was constrained to a physical maximum based on the technologies deployed.
Figure 4. Traditional locally attached storage Helix Core server
By tweaking the way that the depot data is served up to a Helix Core server and using NFS over RDMA on PowerScale, we can deliver extreme single-stream throughput speeds to ensure that the Helix server can move data in the best time possible. An additional benefit of the PowerScale scale-out architecture is that the attached depot storage can grow seamlessly up to petabytes in a single namespace, while remaining online and with no impact to clients. This capability eliminates the traditional constraints of having to upgrade your entire array or head, migrate LUNs, re-stripe data, concatenate LUNs, or expand dynamic volumes, by growing the whole file system on the fly.
An added advantage of having Helix Core clients connected to a PowerScale system is the ability to host NFS workspaces, which enables multiple clients to use the same workspace from multiple hosts.
Figure 5. NAS attached Helix Core server using NFS over RDMA