White Papers

Dell HPC NFS Storage Solution - High Availability (NSS5.5-HA) Configuration with Dell PowerVault
MD3460 and MD3060e Storage Arrays
iii
Contents
Executive summary ....................................................................................................... 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 MD3460 and MD3060e storage arrays ........................................................ 9
4. Evaluation ........................................................................................................... 10
4.1. Method ........................................................................................................ 10
4.2. Test bed ...................................................................................................... 10
4.3. HA functionality ............................................................................................. 14
4.3.1. Potential failures and fault tolerant mechanisms in NSS-HA .................................. 14
4.3.2. HA tests for NSS-HA ................................................................................... 15
5. NSS5.5-HA I/O Performance ..................................................................................... 17
5.1. IPoIB sequential writes and reads ........................................................................ 17
5.2. IPoIB random writes and reads ........................................................................... 18
6. Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 19
7. References .......................................................................................................... 19
Appendix A: Benchmarks and test tools ............................................................................. 21
A.1. IOzone ............................................................................................................ 21
A.2. mdtest ............................................................................................................ 23
A.3. Checkstream .................................................................................................... 24
A.4. The dd Linux utility ............................................................................................ 25
Tables
Table 1. NSS-HA Solutions
(1), (2), (3), (4), (5)
........................................................................... 8
Table 2. Storage configurations in NSS5.5-HA.................................................................... 9
Table 3. NSS5.5-HA hardware configuration ................................................................... 11
Table 4. NSS5.5-HA software versions ........................................................................... 12
Table 5. NSS5.5-HA firmware and driver versions ............................................................. 12
Table 6. NSS5.5-HA client cluster configuration ............................................................... 13
Table 7. NSS-HA mechanisms to handle failures ............................................................... 14
Table 8. Appendix A — IOzone command line arguments .................................................... 21