White Papers

3 Dell HPC NFS Storage Solution – High Availability (NSS7.0-HA) Configuration
Contents
Revisions ............................................................................................................................................................................................. 2
Executive summary .......................................................................................................................................................................... 4
1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................................ 5
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
5 NSS7.0-HA I/O Performance ................................................................................................................................................. 17
5.1 OPA sequential writes and reads ................................................................................................................................ 17
5.2 OPA random write and read operations ................................................................................................................... 18
5.3 OPA metadata operations ........................................................................................................................................... 19
6 Summary ................................................................................................................................................................................... 21
7 References ................................................................................................................................................................................ 22
Appendix A: Benchmarks and test tools ..................................................................................................................................... 23
A.1. IOzone ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 24
A.2. mdtest ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 26
A.3. Checkstream............................................................................................................................................................................. 28
A.4. The dd Linux utility .................................................................................................................................................................. 29