Home > Storage > PowerMax and VMAX > Storage Admin > PowerMax: Family Overview > PowerMax 8000 system configurations
PowerMax 8000 is the flagship of the PowerMax family and provides customers with unmatched scalability, performance, and IOPS density. It can consolidate disparate workloads on a mass scale as eight Bricks, can support over 15 million IOPS (8 K RRH), and can provide up to 4 PB of effective capacity in just two floor tiles of space.
The PowerMax 8000 is a highly configurable data storage array that can support configurations from one to eight Bricks within two standard Dell EMC Titan racks. Each rack can support up to four Bricks. Bricks 1 to 4 always occupy a single rack. PowerMax 8000 only requires a second rack when the Brick count is greater than four.
The following diagram shows PowerMax 8000 single Brick and dual Brick configurations:
The PowerMax 8000 uses redundant 16-port Dell EMC Networking X1018 Ethernet switches for the internal management network. This network connects to every engine and to the two internal InfiniBand fabric switches. The InfiniBand switches are required when two or more Bricks are configured in the system. The redundant 18-port InfiniBand fabric switches connect to every director in the system.
DAE 3 is added with the second Brick. As mentioned previously, DAE 2 is shared by Brick 1 and Brick 2. In DAE 2, drive slots 1 to 14 are used by Brick 1 while slots 15 to 24 are used by Brick 2. A PowerMax 8000 configuration best practice is that every even-numbered Brick shares a DAE with the previous odd-numbered Brick.
Note: For more information about PowerMax 8000 third-party racking options, see the Dell EMC PowerMax Family Site Planning Guide.
The following diagram shows three Brick and four Brick configurations for the PowerMax 8000:
PowerMax 8000 systems that have more than four engines require a second rack (system bay). Bricks are added to the second rack in the same manner and order as Bricks 1 to 4 are added in the first rack. The engines for the Bricks in the second rack are connected to the Dell X1018 Ethernet management switches. The Brick engine directors in the second rack are cabled to the InfiniBand switches in the first rack also. No additional InfiniBand or Dell X1018 switches are required for the second rack.
The PowerMax 8000 supports rack 2 dispersion configurations of up to 82 feet (25 meters) from the fabric switches in rack 1. Dispersed configurations require optical connections between the InfiniBand switches in rack 1 and the Brick engine directors in rack 2. Adjacent rack configurations can use Copper for connections between the Brick engines in rack 2 and the InfiniBand switches in rack 1.
The following diagrams show the various PowerMax 8000 two-rack configurations: