White Papers

Dell HPC NFS Storage Solution High Availability (NSS-HA) Configurations with Dell PowerEdge 12th
Generation Servers
11
3. Dell PowerEdge 12
th
generation servers in NSS4-HA
As compared to the NSS2-HA solution releases, the biggest change in the NSS4-HA release is that the
new Dell PowerEdge R620 12
th
generation server is deployed as an NFS server, while the Dell
PowerEdge R710 11
th
generation server was used as the NFS server in the previous releases.
The Dell PowerEdge R620 server is designed to meet the very high demands of high-performance
computing; it maximizes computing power without compromise in space-sensitive environments. This
section highlights the technology advantages of Dell PowerEdge R620 server and demonstrates that the
Dell PowerEdge R620 is the best-fit server for NSS-HA solution so far. This section also discusses the
PCI-E slot configuration for the Dell PowerEdge R620, which may impact the overall system
performance. Finally, a detailed technical comparison among all three NSS-HA solution releases is
provided.
3.1. Dell PowerEdge R620 vs. Dell PowerEdge R710
Dell NSS-HA solution is designed to provide storage service to HPC clusters. Besides the goal of high
availability and reliability, it is also very important and necessary for a storage-based solution to
deliver a good I/O performance for HPC clusters.
In NSS-HA solution, NFS servers are directly connected to a shared storage stack, and receive/send I/O
requests from an HPC cluster using high speed network connections, such as InfiniBand and 10GbE
Ethernet. To process high volume I/O data in a short period, an NFS server must have balanced network
and disk I/O processing capabilities.
The Dell PowerEdge R620 leverages the current state-of-art technologies to enhance the existing
network and disk I/O processing capabilities to a new degree, as compared to Dell PowerEdge R710.
The key features of Dell PowerEdge R620 are listed below, which make the Dell PowerEdge R620 a
better fit NFS server in NSS-HA than the Dell PowerEdge R710:
 Faster processor: The Dell PowerEdge R620 is equipped with the new Intel Xeon E5-2680 processor,
which provides faster processing speed and more cores than the Intel Xeon E5630 used in Dell
PowerEdge R710.
 Bigger and faster memory: in the Dell PowerEdge R620, the maximum memory size can be 768 GB,
and the memory frequency increased to 1600MHz. With this release of the NSS-HA, the NFS server
is equipped with 128GB of memory running at 1600MT/s versus 96GB of 1333MT/s memory in the
previous solution. Larger memory size and high frequency are critical to server performance.
 Fast internal connection: faster connections are provided throughout the system with 8.0 GT/s with
Intel Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) compared to 5.86GT/s supported with the Intel Xeon E5630 in
the Dell PowerEdge R710.
 Faster InfiniBand link support: In R620, a PCI-E Gen 3 based fourteen data rate (FDR) card is
supported, which can provide up to 56-Gb/sec bandwidth, while the Dell PowerEdge R710 can only
support PCI-E Gen 2 speeds and uses quad data rate (QDR). QDR links have a maximum bandwidth
of 40 Gb/sec.
 Smaller form factor: The Dell PowerEdge R620 is a 1U rack server, while Dell PowerEdge R710 is a
2U rack server, which results in a denser solution with this release of the NSS-HA solution.