White Papers

Dell HPC Lustre Storage solution with Mellanox Infiniband EDR
Targets per enclosure. By using RAID 6, the solution provides higher reliability at a marginal cost on
write performance (due to the extra set of parity data required by each RAID 6). Each OST provides
about 29TB of formatted object storage space when populated with 4TB HDD. With the Dell HPC Lustre
Storage solution, each MD3460 provides 6 OSTs. The OSTs are exposed to clients with LNet via
Infiniband EDR connections.
When viewed from any compute node equipped with the Lustre client, the entire namespace can be
viewed and managed like any other file system, only with the enhancements of Lustre management.
Figure 7: RAID6 Layout on MD3460 arrays
3.4 Scalability
Providing the Object Storage Servers in active/active cluster configurations yields greater throughput
and product reliability. This configuration provides high availability, decreasing maintenance
requirements and consequently reducing potential downtime.
The PowerEdge R730 server provides performance and density. The solution provides 960TB of raw
storage for each OSS pair and leverage Infiniband EDR technology for very high-speed, low-latency
storage transactions. The PowerEdge R730 takes advantage of the PCIe Gen3 x16 interface for the
Infiniband EDR interconnect, helping achieve higher network throughput per OSS.
A Lustre client, version 2.7.15.3, for the RHEL7.2 kernel with Infiniband EDR support is available for
access to the Dell HPC Lustre Storage solution. For details, see the Dell HPC Lustre Storage Solution
Configuration Guide.