White Papers

Dell HPC NFS Storage Solution - High Availability Configurations
Page 1
Contents
Executive Summary (updated May 2011) ........................................................................... 3
1. Introduction ....................................................................................................... 4
1.1. NSS Solution Offerings From Dell ........................................................................ 4
2. Dell NFS Storage Solution Technical Overview .............................................................. 5
3. NFS Storage Solution with High Availability ................................................................. 6
3.1. Hardware .................................................................................................... 6
3.2. Software ..................................................................................................... 9
3.3. High Availability Cluster .................................................................................. 9
3.4. Potential Failures and Fault Tolerance Mechanisms ............................................... 11
3.5. NSS-HA Solution Configurations ........................................................................ 12
3.6. Upgrade from Medium Configuration to Large Configuration .................................... 12
4. Evaluation ....................................................................................................... 13
4.1. Methodology ............................................................................................... 13
4.2. Test Bed (updated May 2011) .......................................................................... 14
4.3. Design Choices that Impact Functionality and Performance ..................................... 16
4.4. Functionality Tests ....................................................................................... 17
5. Performance Benchmark Results (updated May 2011) ................................................... 21
5.1. InfiniBand Sequential Reads and Writes ............................................................. 22
5.2. 10 Gigabit Ethernet Sequential Reads and Writes (updated May 2011) ........................ 23
5.3. Random Reads and Writes .............................................................................. 25
5.4. Metadata tests ............................................................................................ 27
6. Comparison of the NSS Solution Offerings ................................................................. 29
7. Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 30
8. References ....................................................................................................... 30
Appendix A: NSS-HA Recipe (updated May 2011) ............................................................... 32
A.1. Pre-install preparation .................................................................................. 32
A.2. Server side hardware set-up ........................................................................... 33
A.3. Initial software configuration on each PowerEdge R710 .......................................... 34
A.4. Performance tuning on the server .................................................................... 36
A.5. Storage hardware set-up ................................................................................ 37
A.6. Storage Configuration ................................................................................... 37
A.7. NSS HA Cluster setup .................................................................................... 38
A.8. Quick test of HA set-up ................................................................................. 47