White Papers
Table Of Contents
- Executive Summary (updated May 2011)
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Dell NFS Storage Solution Technical Overview
- 3. NFS Storage Solution with High Availability
- 4. Evaluation
- 5. Performance Benchmark Results (updated May 2011)
- 6. Comparison of the NSS Solution Offerings
- 7. Conclusion
- 8. References
- Appendix A: NSS-HA Recipe (updated May 2011)
- A.1. Pre-install preparation
- A.2. Server side hardware set-up
- A.3. Initial software configuration on each PowerEdge R710
- A.4. Performance tuning on the server
- A.5. Storage hardware set-up
- A.6. Storage Configuration
- A.7. NSS HA Cluster setup
- A.8. Quick test of HA set-up
- A.9. Useful commands and references
- A.10. Performance tuning on clients (updated May 2011)
- A.11. Example scripts and configuration files
- Appendix B: Medium to Large Configuration Upgrade
- Appendix C: Benchmarks and Test Tools
Dell HPC NFS Storage Solution - High Availability Configurations
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The NSS is available in three configurations – Small, Medium and Large. These correspond to a 20TB,
40TB and 80TB solution respectively. Figure 1 shows an NSS Medium configuration with two PowerVault
MD1200s.
Figure 1 - NSS-Medium Configuration
The NSS offerings with HA (NSS-HA) extend the NSS solution by introducing a high availability feature. It
leverages the NSS building blocks (such as the server, software, storage and RAID configuration) and
the performance tuning best practices as far as possible.
3. NFS Storage Solution with High Availability
The NFS Storage Solution with High Availability (NSS-HA) consists of a pair of Dell PowerEdge R710
servers that both have physical access to a shared PowerVault MD3200 storage enclosure that is
extended with PowerVault MD1200 storage arrays. The servers are in active-passive configuration with
only one server providing access to the data at any given time. Compute nodes as NFS clients access
the data through the NSS-HA servers. The compute nodes are agnostic to which server owns the data
path to the storage.
The HA functionality is provided through a combination of hardware and software. The following
sections describe the architecture while Appendix A: NSS-HA provides detailed step by step
instructions on setting up an NSS-HA environment.
3.1. Hardware
An NSS-HA configuration is shown in Figure 2. Hardware component redundancy is provided to
achieve a high level of availability.