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PowerMax 8500 provides a maximum capacity of 18PBe that can operate in open systems, mainframe, or mixed environments. The PowerMax 8500 is the most scalable NVMe backend array, and scales from two to eight node pairs.
The PowerMax 8500 can have one to eight node pairs per system. Node pairs and DMEs can be added (scaled out) independently if there is at least a node pair to DME ratio of 1:2 or 2:1. The maximum system configuration is eight node pairs and eight DMEs.
Processor: Intel® Xeon® Gold 6254, 3.9GHz processor with 18 cores in the nodes.
Memory: 48 DDR4 DRAM slots per node pair and PMEM for metadata.
Boot Drive: 64G boot drive and an embedded battery to support vault.
Connectivity: The system supports up to 256 FE ports and has an integrated service processor.
Management: Two Management Control stations in node 1.
Interconnect: The 8500 uses an EDR InfiniBand Fabric with 100Gb/s links on a 36-port switch with 100Gb/s active optical cables with integrated QSFP transceivers and two InfiniBand fabric access modules (FAM) per node pair.
Scale: Up to eight node pairs per system are supported, giving 384 NVMe drives per system when the full eight Fornax DMEs are installed/populated.
Configuration: The base system is one node pair + one DME + two Fabric Switches + SPS pair + Service Tray and PDU (Power Distribution Unit) pair. Node pairs and DMEs can be added independently. Flex RAID supports RAID1 1:1, RAID 5 8+1 and 12+1 and RAID 6: 8+2 and 12+2 with one spare per Disk Group.
Vault: Support for vault to flash in the node.
Data Efficiency: Inline backend compression and de-dupe with offload board. Data at Rest Encryption (D@RE) with SED (Self Encrypting Drives) backend.