Deployment Guide

Introduction

Deploying the FS8600 appliance includes installing the appliance hardware, connecting the FS8600 appliance to the Storage Centers

and the client network, and conguring the FluidFS cluster.

FS8600 Appliance Overview

FS8600 scale-out NAS consists of one to four FS8600 appliances congured as a FluidFS cluster. Each NAS appliance is a rack-

mounted 2U chassis that contains two hot-swappable NAS controllers in an active-active conguration. In a NAS appliance, the

second NAS controller with which one NAS controller is paired is called the peer controller. FS8600 scale-out NAS supports

expansion, that is, you can start with one NAS appliance and add NAS appliances to the FluidFS cluster as needed to increase

performance.

NAS appliance numbers start at 1 and NAS controller numbers start at 0. Appliance 1 contains Controller 0 and Controller 1, Appliance

2 contains Controller 2 and Controller 3, and so on. To identify the physical hardware displayed in Dell Storage Manager, you must

match the service tag shown in Dell Storage Manager with the service tag printed on a sticker on the front-right side of the NAS

appliance.

The following FS8600 appliance congurations are available. All NAS appliances in a FluidFS cluster must use the same conguration.

Mixing 1GbE and 10GbE, or Fibre Channel and iSCSI, is not supported.

• 1Gb Ethernet client connectivity with 8-Gb Fibre Channel back‑end connectivity to the Storage Center

• 10Gb Ethernet client connectivity with 8-Gb Fibre Channel back‑end connectivity to the Storage Center

• 10Gb Ethernet client connectivity with 10-Gb Ethernet iSCSI back‑end connectivity to the Storage Center

Internal Storage

Each NAS controller has an internal storage device that is used only for the FluidFS images and for a cache storage ooad location

in the event of a power failure. The internal hard drive does not provide the NAS storage capacity.

Internal Cache

Each NAS controller has an internal cache that provides fast reads and reliable writes.

FluidFS Architecture Overview

FS8600 scale-out NAS consists of:

• Hardware

– FluidFS cluster

– Storage Center

• NAS appliance network interface connections

– SAN network

– Internal network

– LAN/client network

The following gure shows an overview of the FS8600 scale-out NAS architecture.

Introduction