Administrator Guide

Solution Architecture
10 Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC PixStor Storage | Document ID
Mellanox SB7800 Switches to provide high speed access via Infiniband (IB) EDR or 100 GbE.
Solution Components
This solution was planned to be released with the latest Intel Xeon 2
nd
generation Scalable Xeon CPUs, a.k.a.
Cascade Lake CPUs and some of the servers will use the fastest RAM available to them (2933 MT/s).
However, due to current hardware available to work on the prototype of the solution to characterize
performance, servers with Intel Xeon 1
st
generation Scalable Xeon CPUs a.k.a. Skylake processors and in
some cases slower RAM were used to characterize this system. Since the bottleneck of the solution is at the
SAS controllers of the DellEMC PowerVault ME40x4 arrays, no significant performance disparity is expected
once the Skylake CPUs and RAM are replaced with the envisioned Cascade Lake CPUs and faster RAM.
Table 1 has the list of main components for the solution, but when discrepancies were introduced for the
situation mentioned above, the first description column has for the planned component to be used at release
time and therefore available to customers, and the last column is the component actually used for
characterizing the performance of the solution. The drives listed or data (12TB NLS) and metadata (960Gb
SSD), are the ones used for performance characterization, and faster drives can provide better Random IOPs
and may improve create/removal metadata operations.
Software components listed in Table 1 describe versions during the initial testing and at release time.
However, these software versions change over time to include important bug fixes, support for new hardware
components or add important new features. When software versions were updated before characterizing a
new component, a small table with versions used will be included.
Finally, for completeness, the list of possible data HDDs and metadata SSDs was included, which is based on
the drives supported as enumerated on the DellEMC PowerVault ME4 support matrix, available online.
Table 1 Components to be used at release time and those used in the Test bed
Solution Component
At Release
Test Bed
Internal Mgmt Connectivity
Dell Networking S3048-ON Gigabit Ethernet
Data Storage Subsystem
1x to 4x Dell EMC PowerVault ME4084
1x to 4x Dell EMC PowerVault ME484 (One per ME4084)
80 – 12TB 3.5" NL SAS3 HDD drives
Options 900GB @15K, 1.2TB @10K, 1.8TB @10K, 2.4TB @10K,
4TB NLS, 8TB NLS, 12TB NLS, 16TB NLS.
8 LUNs, linear 8+2 RAID 6, chunk size 512KiB.
4 - 1.92TB SAS3 SSDs for Metadata – 2x RAID 1 (or 4 - Global HDD spares,
if Optional High Demand Metadata Module is used)
Optional High Demand
Metadata Storage Subsystem
1x to 2x Dell EMC PowerVault ME4024
(4x ME4024 if needed, Large config only)
24 – 960GB 2.5" SSD SAS3 drives (Options 480GB, 960GB, 1.92TB, 3.84TB)
12 LUNs, linear RAID 1.
RAID Storage Controllers
Redundant 12 Gbps SAS
Capacity w/o Expansion
Raw: 4032 TB (3667 TiB or 3.58 PiB)
Formatted ~ 3072 GB (2794 TiB or 2.73 PiB)
Capacity w/Expansion
Raw: 8064 TB (7334 TiB or 7.16 PiB)
Formatted ~ 6144 GB (5588 TiB or 5.46 PiB)
Proces
sor
Gateway/Ngenea
2x Intel Xeon Gold 6230 2.1G,
20C/40T, 10.4GT/s, 27.5M Cache,
Turbo, HT (125W) DDR4-2933
2x Intel Xeon Gold 6136 @ 3.0 GHz,
12 cores
High Demand Metadata