White Papers

Dell HPC NFS Storage Solution - High Availability (NSS-HA) Configuration with Dell PowerVault
MD3260/MD3060e Storage Arrays
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Contents
Executive summary (updated May 2013) .............................................................................. 5
1. Introduction ........................................................................................................... 6
2. Overview of NSS-HA solutions ..................................................................................... 6
2.1. A brief introduction to NSS-HA solutions .................................................................. 6
2.2. NSS-HA offerings from Dell .................................................................................. 7
3. Dell PowerVault MD3260 and MD3060e storage arrays ........................................................ 9
4. Evaluation ........................................................................................................... 11
4.1. Method ........................................................................................................ 11
4.2. Test bed ...................................................................................................... 11
4.3. HA functionality ............................................................................................. 14
4.3.1. Potential failures and fault tolerant mechanisms in NSS-HA .................................. 15
4.3.2. HA tests for NSS-HA ................................................................................... 15
5. NSS4.5-HA I/O Performance (updated May 2013) ............................................................ 17
5.1. IPoIB sequential writes and reads ........................................................................ 18
5.2. IPoIB random writes and reads ........................................................................... 18
5.3. IPoIB metadata operations ................................................................................ 19
6. Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 21
7. References .......................................................................................................... 21
Appendix A: Benchmarks and test tools ............................................................................. 22
A.1. IOzone ............................................................................................................ 22
A.2. mdtest ............................................................................................................ 24
A.3. Checkstream .................................................................................................... 25
A.4. The dd Linux utility ............................................................................................ 26
Tables
Table 1. NSS-HA Solutions
(1), (2), (3)
.................................................................................. 8
Table 2. Storage components in NSS-HA ........................................................................ 10
Table 3. NSS4.5-HA hardware configuration ................................................................... 12
Table 4. NSS4.5-HA software versions ........................................................................... 13
Table 5. NSS4.5-HA firmware and driver versions ............................................................. 13
Table 6. NSS4.5-HA client configuration ........................................................................ 14
Table 7. NSS-HA mechanisms to handle failures ............................................................... 15
Table 8. Appendix A — IOzone command line arguments .................................................... 22