White Papers

Dell HPC NFS Storage Solution - High Availability (NSS-HA) Configuration with Dell PowerVault
MD3260/MD3060e Storage Arrays
5
Executive summary (updated May 2013)
This solution guide describes the Dell NFS Storage Solution - High Availability configurations (NSS-HA)
with Dell PowerVault MD3260 and MD3060e storage arrays. The PowerVault MD3260 and MD3060e are
high-density storage enclosures that are able to provide 60 3.5” drives in 4U of rack space. This
solution guide presents a comparison between all available NSS-HA offerings so far, and provides
performance-tuning best practices and performance results for a configuration with a storage system
capacity of 360TB.
The NSS-HA solution described is designed to enhance the availability of storage service to the HPC
cluster by using a pair of Dell PowerEdge servers and PowerVault storage arrays along with Red Hat HA
software stack. As in previous versions of Dell NSS-HA solution guides, the goal of this solution guide is
to improve storage service availability and maintain data integrity in the presence of possible failures
or faults and to maximize performance in a failure-free scenario.
Version 2.0 of the white paper, dated May 2013, includes updated performance results.