Technical information

June 2012 Dell EqualLogic Configuration Guide v13.2 71

5 FS Series NAS Appliance

The Dell EqualLogic FS7500 adds scale-out unified file and block Network Attached Storage (NAS)

capabilities to any

EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI SANs. The FS7500 was introduced in July 2011. It is the

first EqualLogic based FS Series appliance released by Dell. The key design features and benefits

provided by the EqualLogic FS Series include:

• A scalable unified (block and file), virtualized IP based storage platform.

• Seamless capacity and performance scaling to meet growing storage demands. By increasing

the number of EqualLogic arrays and FS Series controllers you can scale both storage capacity

and I/O performance as needed.

• A single configuration and management UI (the EqualLogic Group Manager) from which both

block and file storage features are controlled.

• The Dell Fluid File System (FluidFS) is a high-performance scale-out file system capable of

presenting a single file-system namespace through a virtual IP address, regardless of the

number of NAS appliances in the cluster. FluidFS is designed to optimize file access

performance and hardware utilization while eliminating capacity constraints.

5.1 FS Series Architecture

The FS Series appliance connects to an EqualLogic PS Series SAN via standard iSCSI connection paths

with iSCSI based block level I/O taking place between the FS Series appliance initiators and the target

volumes on the PS Series arrays. The FS Series controllers host the FluidFS based NAS file system and

all front-end client protocol connection management and load balancing, as well as manage all back-

end data protection and high-availability functions.

Figure 26 illustrates the FS7500 architecture supporting unified storage requirements. Referring to

Figure 26:

• It is a unified solution because the system is providing both block and file level storage.

• The storage pool shows a single pool that contains a NAS Reserve (managed by the FS7500)

plus other volumes that are providing block I/O storage targets not used by the FS7500. To

emphasize this flexibility, we show a group of servers connecting to the FS7500 via the LAN

Switches (acting as CIFS/NFS clients) and connecting directly to the iSCSI SAN switches for

block I/O.

• The EqualLogic Group Manager provides a single user interface for configuring and managing

PS Series and FS Series functions.

Any new or existing EqualLogic PS Series array running controller firmware version 5.1 or later