
New File Services Capabilities of PowerFlex 4.0
Tue, 16 Aug 2022 14:56:28 -0000
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“Just file it,” they say, and your obvious question is “where?” One of the new features introduced in PowerFlex 4.0 is file services. Which means that you can file it in PowerFlex. In this blog we’ll dig into the new file service capabilities offered with 4.0 and how they can benefit your organization.
I know that when I think of file services, I think back to the late 90s and early 2000s when most organizations had a Microsoft Windows NT box or two in the rack that provided a centralized location on the network for file storage. Often it was known as “cheap and deep storage,” because you bought the biggest cheapest drives you could to install in that server with RAID 5 protection. After all, most of the time it was user files that were being worked on and folks already had a copy saved to their desktop. The file share didn’t have to be fast or responsive, and the biggest concern of the day was using up all the space on those massive 146 GB drives!
That was then … today file services do so much more. They need to be responsive, reliable, and agile to handle not only the traditional shared files, but also the other things that are now stored on file shares.
The most common thing people think about is user data from VDI instances. All the files that make up a user’s desktop, from the background image to the documents, to the customization of folders, all these things and more are traditionally stored in a file share when using instant clones.
PowerFlex can also handle powerful, high performance workload scenarios such as image classification and training. This is because of the storage backend. It is possible to rapidly serve files to training nodes and other high performance processing systems. The storage calls can go to the first available storage node, reducing file recall times. This of course extends to other high speed file workloads as well.
Beyond rapid recall times, PowerFlex provides massive performance, with 6-nines of availability1, and native multi-pathing. This is a big deal for modern file workloads. With VDI alone you need all of these things. If your file storage system can’t deliver them, you could be looking at poor user experience or worse: users who can’t work. I know, that’s a scary thought and PowerFlex can help significantly lessen those fears.
In addition to the performance, you can manage the file servers in the same PowerFlex UI as the rest of your PowerFlex environment. This means there is no need to learn a new UI, or bounce all over to set up a CIFS share—it’s all at your fingertips. In the UI it’s as simple as changing the tab to go from block to file on many screens.
The PowerFlex file controllers (physical) host the software for the NAS servers (logical). You start with two file controllers and can grow to 16 file controllers. Having various sizes of file controllers allows you to customize performance to meet your environment’s needs. The NAS Servers are containerized logical segmentations that provide the file services to the clients, and you can have up to 512 in a cluster. They are responsible for namespaces, security policies, and serving file systems to the clients.
Each of the file volumes that are provided by the file services are backed by PowerFlex volumes. This means that you can increase file service performance and capacity by adding PowerFlex nodes to the storage layer just like a traditional block storage instance. This allows you to independently scale performance and capacity, based on your needs.
The following table provides some of the other specs you might be wondering about.
Feature | Max |
FS Capacity | 256 TB |
Max file size | 64 TB |
# of files | 10 billion |
# of ACLs | 4 million |
User File Systems | 4096 |
Snaps per File System | 126 |
CIFS | 160000 |
NFS exports | 80000 |
Beyond the architectural goodness, file storage is something that can be added later to a PowerFlex environment. Thus, you aren’t forced to get something now because you “might” need it later. You can implement it when that project starts or when you’re ready to migrate off that single use file server. You can also grow it as you need, by starting small and growing to a large deployment with hundreds of namespaces and thousands of file systems.
With PowerFlex when someone says “file it,” you’ll know you have the capacity to support that file and many more. PowerFlex file services provide the capability to deliver the power needed for even the most demanding file-based workloads like VDI and AI/ML data classification systems. It’s as easy managing the environment as it is integrated into the UI.
If you are interested in finding out more about PowerFlex file services, contact your Dell representative.
Author: Tony Foster
Twitter: @wonder_nerd
LinkedIn
1 Workload performance claims based on internal Dell testing. (Source: IDC Business Value Snapshot for PowerFlex – 2020.)
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VMware Explore, PowerFlex, and Silos of Glitter: this blog has it all!
Fri, 18 Aug 2023 19:30:20 -0000
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Those who know me are aware that I’ve been a big proponent of one platform that must be able to support multiple workloads—and Dell PowerFlex can. If you are at VMware Explore you can see a live demo of both traditional database workloads and AI workloads running on the same four PowerFlex nodes.
When virtualization took the enterprise by storm, a war was started against silos. First was servers, and the idea that we can consolidate them on a few large hosts with virtualization. This then rapidly moved to storage and continued to blast through every part of the data center. Yet today we still have silos. Mainly in the form of workloads, these hide in plain sight - disguised with other names like “departmental,” “project,” or “application group.”
Some of these workload silos are becoming even more stealthy and operate under the guise of needing “different” hardware or performance, so IT administrators allow them to operate in a separate silo.
That is wasteful! It wastes company resources, it wastes the opportunity to do more, and it wastes your time managing multiple environments. It has become even more of an issue with the rise of Machine Learning (ML) and AI workloads.
If you are at VMware Explore this year you can see how to break down these silos with Dell PowerFlex at the Kioxia booth (Booth 309). Experience the power of running ResNet 50 image classification and OLTP (Online Transactional Processing) workloads simultaneously, live from the show floor. And if that’s not enough, there are experts, and lots of them! You might even get the chance to visit with the WonderNerd.
This might not seem like a big deal, right? You just need a few specialty systems, some storage, and a bit of IT glitter… some of the systems run the databases, some run the ML workloads. Sprinkle some of that IT glitter and poof you’ve got your workloads running together. Well sort of. They’re in the same rack at least.
Remember: silos are bad. Instead, let’s put some PowerFlex in there! And put that glitter back in your pocket, this is a data center, not a five-year old’s birthday party.
PowerFlex supports NVIDIA GPUs with MIG technology which is part of NVIDIA AI Enterprise, so we can customize our GPU resources for the workloads that need them. (Yes, there is nothing that says you can’t run different workloads on the same hosts.) Plus, PowerFlex uses Kioxia PM7 series SSDs, so there is plenty of IOPS to go around while ensuring sub-millisecond latency for both workloads. This allows the data to be closer to the processing, maybe even on the same host.
In our lab tests, we could push one million transactions per minute (TPM) with OLTP workloads while also processing 6620 images per second using a RESNET50 model built on NVIDIA NGC containers. These are important if you want to keep customers happy, especially as more and more organizations add AI/ML capabilities to their online apps, and more and more data is generated from all those new apps.
Here are the TPM results from the demo environment that is running our four SQL VMs. The TPMs in this test are maxing out around 320k and the latency is always sub-millisecond. This is the stuff you want to show off, not that pocket full of glitter.
Yeah, you can silo your environments and hide them with terms like “project” and “application group,” but everyone will still know they are silos.
We all started battling silos at the dawn of virtualization. PowerFlex with Kioxia drives and NVIDIA GPUs gives administrators a fighting chance to win the silo war.
You can visit the NVIDIA team at Lounge L3 on the show floor during VMware Explore. And of course, you have to stop by the Kioxia booth (309) to see what PowerFlex can do for your IT battles. We’ll see you there!
Author: Tony Foster
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Contributors: Kailas Goliwadekar, Anup Bharti

Managing Dell PowerFlex Licensing and Being Way Less Sad
Mon, 24 Jul 2023 21:20:14 -0000
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Imagine there was an easy way to view and manage your Dell PowerFlex licenses. Wouldn’t that be nice? I know I’d be way less sad. Well guess what, I’m way less sad, and there’s a way to easily manage your PowerFlex licenses.
I was on a call today with one of our product managers. He was showing something really cool, and I just had to share it with everyone. You can go into CloudIQ and view all your PowerFlex licenses.
You might think, “big deal, licenses.” You’re right! It is a big deal. Okay, a moderate sized deal, it makes me less sad. And here’s why. Have you ever had to track licenses for your environment in a spreadsheet? How about sharing that spreadsheet with everyone else on your team and hoping that no one accidently removes too many rows or types in the wrong cell. Or maybe you have to correlate a license to how much capacity you’re using. I’m sure 90% of users love this method. What’s that I hear you yelling at your monitor, I’m wrong???
You’re correct, hardly anyone wants to track licenses that way. Why? Because its error prone and difficult to manage, plus it’s not automated. Oh, and it’s licensing. Well, CloudIQ can help you address a lot of this, at least for your PowerFlex environment.
That’s right. You log in, click on the Entitlements and System Licenses option in the menu, and you can see all your entitlements for PowerFlex. With that you can see how many terabytes of capacity each license has as well as the start and end dates. It’s all there, no spreadsheets, no manual entry, it’s easy to manage. Maybe 90% of users would prefer this method over a spreadsheet. You can see this functionality in the screenshot below.
It gets better though…. Maybe you want to dig into the details of your environment and see how different licenses are being used. Maybe you are licensed for a petabyte of storage but you’re missing 50ish terabytes and want to see where they went. If you click on the details of an entitlement, you can see which systems are consuming capacity from the license. This makes it a lot easier than a spreadsheet to track down. You can see this in the following screenshot.
I’m sure it’s hard to get excited over licensing, but hopefully this makes you way less sad knowing you don’t have to try and track all this in a spreadsheet. Instead, you just log in to CloudIQ, then click on Entitlements and System Licenses. Poof, there it all is, in an easy-to-consume format. And for those who still want to manage their licenses in a spreadsheet, there’s an export option at the top of the table just for you. You can create pivot tables to your heart’s content. For everyone else, you’ve just unlocked a PowerFlex secret. Hopefully, like me, this makes you way less sad about licensing.
If you’re interested in finding out more about what you can do with licensing in CloudIQ, reach out to your Dell representative, who can guide you on all CloudIQ has to offer.
Author: Tony Foster
Sr. Principal Technical Marketing Engineer
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Location: | The Land of Oz [-6 GMT] |