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7 BP1038| Best Practices and Guidelines for Integrating the Dell EqualLogic FS7600 and FS7610 into an Existing SAN
2 Dell EqualLogic FS Series NAS Appliance
The FS Series NAS Appliance is an active/active appliance cluster that consists of two controllers housed in
a single 2U rack space enclosure. Each appliance provides 48 GB of RAM (24 GB in each controller) that is
used for the system as well as the mirrored, battery protected cache memory. Up to two FS7600 or
FS7610 can work together to provide file storage from one EqualLogic group. Both NAS appliances
actively participate in file I/O and automatically distribute new users across available controllers and
network ports.
The EqualLogic FS Series NAS Appliance supports all new and existing EqualLogic arrays that are running
firmware version 6.0 and later. A NAS cluster with one or two FS7600 or FS7610 appliances can access a
single storage pool with up to eight EqualLogic PS Arrays. Each EqualLogic FS7600 controller has four 1
GbE ports for client-side NAS connectivity for NFS and CIFS clients. Four additional 1 GbE ports are used
to connect to the EqualLogic iSCSI SAN. Each EqualLogic FS7610 has two 10 GbE ports per controller for
client-side NAS connectivity, and two more 10 GbE ports per controller for connectivity to an EqualLogic
iSCSI SAN. Controllers in each appliance communicate internally through an internal PCIe backplane for
tasks such as write-cache mirroring.
The FS Series NAS appliance also has built-in snapshot capabilities, using a redirect-on-write method.
When a snapshot is enabled, any changes to existing data in that snapshot are preserved, and subsequent
read/write access is redirected to the new data. This method of snapshots is implemented in the file
system (FluidFS) and does not require additional physical disk space for holding snapshots. Instead it
utilizes reserved, unused space from the existing NAS file system. Additional features of the FS Series NAS
Appliance include replication, Active Directory/LDAP integration, NDMP–based backup support, Network
Information Services (NIS), CIFS antivirus integration, and user quotas.
More information on these and other features can be found at www.dell.com/fs7600.