Technology overview

The new Dell EMC PowerStore system is a midrange storage product with a container-based active/active architecture. The PowerStore system supports the latest storage media, such as NVMe SCM, NVMe SSDs, and NVMe NVRAM drives. This system is a highly available 2U two-node-based appliance and comes with a flexible consumption model. The PowerStore system can scale out to up to four appliances (eight nodes) in a cluster and scale up to three expansion enclosures per appliance.

The following figure shows a PowerStore appliance:

Figure 2.                  PowerStore enclosure

The PowerStore series consists of appliances that are available in one of the following configurations:

• PowerStore T appliances are storage-centric. PowerStore T models enable you to manage and provision block and file storage to external hosts. During the initial configuration, you can configure an appliance for unified (block and file) storage or block-only storage. 

In SAP HANA environments, configure the appliance for unified storage even when block storage is used for the SAP HANA persistence. The SAP HANA shared file system 
(/hana/shared) can reside on a PowerStore NFS share. 

Only PowerStore T models are certified for running SAP HANA. 

• PowerStore X appliances are application-centric and storage-centric. PowerStore X models provide a hypervisor layer in addition to block storage. This additional capability enables you to deploy and manage virtual machines and applications. 
  
  PowerStore X models are not certified for running SAP HANA.

Each of these appliance configurations is available in different models with varying or expanding memory and CPU capabilities, as described in Table 1. To expand compute and storage capabilities, you can configure up to four appliances into a PowerStore cluster that acts as a single component for resource management, efficiency, and availability. You can also add expansion enclosures to each appliance to further expand storage capabilities. 

Dell EMC has certified the following PowerStore T models for SAP HANA: 1000T, 3000T, 5000T, 7000T, and 9000T.

The following table shows high-level specifications for the PowerStore T models. For more information, see the PowerStore data and specification sheet. 

Table 1.              PowerStore storage specifications by model

All PowerStore T models are certified for SAP HANA TDI deployments using FC SAN only. The NAS (NFS) protocol can be used for the SAP HANA shared file system (/hana/shared).