Administrator Guide

BeeGFS High Capacity Storage solution architecture
12 Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC BeeGFS High Capacity Storage | ID 424
3.5 Storage targets
Figure 6 illustrates how each storage array is divided into eight linear RAID 6 disk groups, with eight data and
two parity disks per virtual disk.
RAID 6 (8+2) LUNs layout on one ME4084
Each OST provides about 64 TB of formatted object storage space when populated with 8 TB HDDs. Since
each array has 84 drives, after creating eight RAID-6 disk groups, we have 4 spare drives per array, 2 per
tray, which can be configured as global hot spares across the 8 disk groups in the array. For every disk group,
a single volume using all the space is created. As a result, a large base configuration as shown in Figure 2
has a total of 32 linear RAID 6 volumes across four ME4084 storage arrays. Each of these RAID 6 volumes
are configured as an OST for the BeeGFS file system, resulting in a total of 32 STs across the file system in
the base configuration.
The STs are exposed to clients via Mellanox InfiniBand HDR100 connection. From any compute node that is
equipped with the BeeGFS client, the entire namespace can be viewed and managed like any other file
system.
3.6 Hardware and software configuration
The following table describes the hardware and software details of the solution.
Solution hardware and software specifications:
Component
Specification
Management server
1 x Dell EMC PowerEdge R640
MDS
2 x Dell EMC PowerEdge R740
Storage servers
2 x Dell EMC PowerEdge R740
Processors
Management server: Dual Intel Xeon Gold 5218
MDS and SS servers: Dual Intel Xeon Gold 6230
Memory
Management server: 12 x 8 GB 2666 MT/s DDR4 RDIMMs
MDS and SS servers: 12 x 32 GB 2933 MT/s DDR4 RDIMMs