Concept Guide

Scalability of Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC BeeGFS Storage
24 Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC BeeGFS High Performance Storage | ID 460
Base Configurations and Scalable Configurations
*MDS
SS
Small
Small + 1
Small + 2
Medium
Medium + 1
Scalable Configurations
The metadata portion of the stack remains the same for all the above configurations described in this blog.
This is because the storage capacity requirements for BeeGFS metadata are typically 0.5% to 1% of the total
storage capacity. However, it really depends on the number of directories and files in the file system. The
guideline is that the user can add an additional metadata server when the percentage of metadata capacity to
the storage falls below 1%. Table 7 shows the measured performance data for the different flexible
configurations of the BeeGFS Storage Solution. Additional details are provided in Section 5.4.
Capacity and Performance Details of Scaled Configurations
Component
Small
Small + 1
Small +2
Medium
Medium +1
Total U (MDS+SS)
6U
8U
10U
12U
14U
# of Dedicated Storage Servers
2
3
4
5
6
# of NVMe Drives for data storage
60
84
108
132
156
Estimated Usable
Space
1.6 TB
86 TiB
121 TiB
156 TiB
190 TiB
225 TiB
3.2 TB
173 TiB
242 TiB
311 TiB
380 TiB
449 TiB
6.4 TB
346 TiB
484 TiB
622 TiB
761 TiB
898 TiB
Peak Sequential Read
60.1 GB/s
83.3 GB/s
105.2 GB/s
132.4 GB/s
152.9 GB/s
Peak Sequential Write
57.7 GB/s
80.3 GB/s
99.8 GB/s
120.7 GB/s
139.9 GB/s
5.4 Performance Characterization of Scalable Configurations
The performance of the various configurations was tested by creating storage pools. The small configuration
has 15 storage targets and each additional storage server adds an additional six storage targets. So, for the
purpose of testing the performance of the various configurations, storage pools were created from 15 to 39
storage targets (increments of six for small, small+1, small+2, medium, medium+1). For each of those pools,
three iterations of IOzone benchmark were run, each with one to 1024 threads (in powers of two increments).