White Papers

Dell HPC NFS Storage Solution High Availability (NSS-HA) Configurations with Dell PowerEdge 12th

Generation Servers

4. Evaluation

The architecture proposed in this white paper was evaluated in the Dell HPC lab. This section describes

the test methodology and the test bed used for verification. It also contains details on the functionality

tests.

4.1. Method

The NFS Storage Solution described in this solution guide was tested for HA functionality and

performance. A 288TB NSS4-HA configuration was used to test the HA functionality of the solution.

Different types of failures were introduced and the fault tolerance and robustness of the solution was

measured. “HA functionality” describes these functionality tests and their results. Functionality testing

was similar to the work done in the previous versions of the solution

(3)

4.2. Test bed

The test bed used to evaluate the NSS4-HA functionality and performance is shown in Figure 4.

 A 64 node HPC compute cluster was used to provide I/O traffic for the test bed.

 A pair of Dell PowerEdge R620 servers are configured as an active-passive HA pair and function as

an NFS gateway for the HPC compute cluster (also called the clients).

 Both NFS servers are connected shared Dell PowerVault MD3200 SAS storage extended with Dell

PowerVault MD1200 arrays (Figure 4 shows a 288TB solution with eight MD storage arrays) at the

backend. The user data resides on an XFS file system created on this storage. The XFS file system is

exported using NFS to the clients.

 The NFS servers are connected to the clients using the public network. This network is either

InfiniBand or 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

 For the HA functionality of the NFS servers, a private Gigabit Ethernet network is configured to

monitor server health and heartbeat, and to provide a route for the fencing operations using a

PowerConnect 5424 Gigabit Ethernet switch.

 Power to the NFS servers is driven by two APC switched PDUs on two separate power buses.

Complete configuration details are provided in Table 6, 0, and Table 8.