White Papers

5 BP1038| Best Practices and Guidelines for Integrating the Dell EqualLogic FS7600 and FS7610 into an Existing SAN
1 Introduction
The Dell EqualLogic FS7600 and FS7610 FS Series NAS Appliance add scale-out unified NAS capabilities to
EqualLogic iSCSI SANs and enable management of iSCSI, CIFS, and NFS access from a single management
console. The FS Series NAS Appliance integrates into an EqualLogic iSCSI SAN and can be deployed along
with additional new arrays or it can leverage an existing EqualLogic iSCSI SAN deployment. Unlike many
unified storage solutions that only scale in capacity, the EqualLogic FS Series NAS Appliance can scale
capacity and performance. When more storage capacity or I/O performance is required, adding more
EqualLogic arrays or expanding the Dell Fluid File System (by adding an additional appliance) enables the
system to scale out to meet those needs.
The EqualLogic FS Series NAS Appliance incorporates the Dell FluidFS, which 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 controllers in the cluster. While many NAS solutions have strict limits on
file share size, the Dell Fluid File System and FS Series NAS Appliance allow a single file system to scale to
the capacity of the EqualLogic storage deployment (up to 509 TB usable) and present it as a single name
space.
1.1 Audience
This white paper is intended for storage administrators who are planning, implementing, or integrating a
Dell EqualLogic FS7600 or FS7610 into an existing EqualLogic iSCSI SAN. Readers should be familiar with
general concepts of Dell EqualLogic iSCSI storage as well as Ethernet Local Area Network (LAN) and basic
Network Attached Storage (NAS) concepts.
1.2 Terminology
The following terms are used throughout this document.
Table 1 Definition of common terms
Term
Definition
Block Heavy Mix For the purpose of this paper, a workload which consists of 67% block I/O and
33% file I/O.
Block I/O or Block
storage
Describes how an application on a host server accesses data on a local or SAN
connected storage system.
Common Internet
File System (CIFS)
also known as
Server Message
Block (SMB)
A network protocol typically used by Windows clients to access printers and
file shares.
File Heavy Mix
For the purpose of this paper, a workload which consists of 67% file I/O and
33% block I/O.