Concept Guide

Dell EMC BeeGFS Storage Solution Reference Architecture
8 Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC BeeGFS High Performance Storage | ID 460
3.2 Metadata Server
A PowerEdge R740xd with 24x Intel P4600 1.6 TB NVMe drives is used for metadata storage. As the storage
capacity requirements for BeeGFS metadata are small, instead of using a dedicated metadata server,
only the 12 drives on NUMA zone 0 were used to host the Metadata Targets (MDTs), while the remaining 12
drives on NUMA zone 1 host Storage Targets (STs). Figure 3 shows the metadata server. The 12 drives
enclosed in the yellow rectangle are the MDTs in the NUMA zone 0 whereas the 12 drives enclosed in the
green rectangle are the STs in the NUMA zone 1. This configuration not only avoids NUMA issues but also
provides enough metadata storage to facilitate scaling the capacity and performance as needed.
Metadata Server
Figure 4 shows the raid configuration of the metadata server. This figure shows how in the metadata server
the drives in the NUMA zone 0 host the MDTs and those in NUMA zone 1 host the storage data, while the
storage servers host the STs in both the NUMA zones.
Configuration of drives in the Metadata Server
The 12 drives used for metadata are configured as 6x RAID 1 disk group of 2 drives, each serving as an
MDT. There are 6 metadata services running each of which handles one MDT. The remaining 12 storage
drives are configured in 3x RAID 0 disk groups of 4 drives each. There are three storage services running on
the NUMA 1 zone, one service for each ST. So, the server which co-hosts the metadata and Storage Targets
has 6 MDTs and 3 STs. It also runs 6 metadata services and three storage services. Each MDT is an ext4 file
system
5
based on a RAID 1 configuration. The STs are based on XFS file system configured in RAID 0.