White Papers

Dell HPC NFS Storage Solution - High Availability (NSS6.0-HA) Configuration with Dell PowerEdge 13
th
Generation Servers
6
1. Introduction
This white paper provides information on the latest Dell NFS Storage Solution - High Availability
configurations with Dell PowerEdge 13
th
generation servers. The solution uses Dell PowerEdge servers
and PowerVault storage arrays along with Red Hat High Availability software stack to provide an easy to
manage, reliable, and cost effective storage solution for HPC clusters. It leverages the latest Dell
PowerEdge 13
th
generation servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 operating system (RHEL 7.0) to
deliver more powerfull storage solutions than previous NSS-HA solutions. This version of the solution is
NSS6.0-HA.
The design principle for this release remains the same as previous Dell NSS-HA solutions. The major
changes between the current and the last version of NSS-HA solution( NSS5.5-HA) are
 the change from Dell PowerEdge 12
th
generation servers (R620) to the latest PowerEdge 13
th
generation servers (R630);
 the change from the RHEL 6.5 to RHEL 7.0;
 and the change from 3TB disks to 4TB disks.
With those changes, the NSS6.0-HA gains the following two improvements
 It supports larger storage capacity than previous NSS-HA releases. The maximum capacity is up
to 500TB, while 300TB is the limit of previous NSS-HA releases.
 It delivers faster sequential read performance than NSS5.5-HA, 75% on average, and maintains
similar write performance as NSS5.5-HA.
For complete details of the NSS-HA solution family, review this document along with the previous NSS-
HA white papers and blogs
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
.
The following sections describe the technical details, evaluation method, and the expected
performance of the solution.
2. Overview of NSS-HA solutions
Along with the current version, four versions of NSS-HA solutions have been released since 2011. This
section provides a brief description of the NSS-HA solution, and lists the available Dell NSS-HA
offerings.
2.1. A brief introduction to NSS-HA solutions
The design of the NSS-HA solution for each version is similar. In general, the core of the solution is a
high availability (HA) cluster
(7)
, which provides a highly reliable and available storage service to HPC
compute clusters via a high performance network connection such as InfiniBand (IB) or 10 Gigabit
Ethernet (10GbE).
The HA cluster consists of a pair of Dell PowerEdge servers and a network switch. The two PowerEdge
servers have shared access to disk-based Dell PowerVault storage in a variety of capacities, and both
are directly connected to the HPC cluster via IB or 10GbE. The two servers are equipped with two
fence devices: iDRAC7 Enterprise and an APC Power Distribution Unit (PDU). If failures such as storage
disconnection, network disconnection, system crash, etc., occur on one server, the HA cluster will