White Papers

Dell HPC NFS Storage Solution - High Availability (NSS6.0-HA) Configuration with Dell PowerEdge 13
th
Generation Servers
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 .................................................................................. 8
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 ............................................................................................. 13
4.3.1. Potential failures and fault tolerant mechanisms in NSS-HA .................................. 13
4.3.2. HA tests for NSS-HA ................................................................................... 14
5. NSS6.0-HA I/O Performance ..................................................................................... 16
5.1. IPoIB sequential writes and reads ........................................................................ 16
5.2. IPoIB random writes and reads ........................................................................... 17
6. Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 18
7. References .......................................................................................................... 19
Appendix A: Benchmarks and test tools ............................................................................. 20
A.1. IOzone ............................................................................................................ 20
A.2. Checkstream .................................................................................................... 22
A.3. The dd Linux utility ............................................................................................ 22
Tables
Table 1. NSS-HA Solutions
(1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6)
........................................................................ 8
Table 2. Storage configurations in NSS6.0-HA.................................................................... 9
Table 3. NSS6.0-HA hardware configuration ................................................................... 11
Table 4. NSS6.0-HA software versions ........................................................................... 12
Table 5. NSS6.0-HA client cluster configuration ............................................................... 13
Table 6. NSS-HA mechanisms to handle failures ............................................................... 14
Table 7. Appendix A IOzone command line arguments .................................................... 20
Figures
Figure 1. The infrastructure of the NSS-HA solution ............................................................. 7
Figure 2. NSS6.0-HA test bed ...................................................................................... 11
Figure 3. IPoIB large sequential write and read performance ............................................... 17