Product Overview - Dell PowerVault NX3500 Technical Manual

DELL PowerVault NX3500, A Dell Technical Guide

The PowerVault NX3500 adds scale-up NAS capability to PowerVault

MD32x0iand MD36x0i storage to create a scale-up Unified Storage

solution. It is an easy-to-use solution for smaller-scale deployments

with increasing iSCSI, NFS and CIFS-based data storage needs. With the

PowerVault MD backend, you can scale storage of CIFS, NFS and iSCSI-

based data up to 192 TB of capacity. As your storage needs increase,

you can add or modify block and file capacity dynamically as needed

without disrupting your existing applications and storage systems.

The PowerVault NX3500 incorporates Dell Scalable File System, a high

performance, high availability file system based on proven technology.

The PowerVault NX3500 also offers affordable data protection features,

including user-restorable snapshots, asynchronous replication, and

NDMP backup capabilities.

The PowerVault NX3500 Difference

Today, a majority of organizations store and manage block and file

data on separate, non-integrated storage systems. Both SAN (Storage

Area Network, primarily Fibre Channel, and iSCSI) and NAS (Network

Attached Storage, primarily CIFS and NFS) can be used to store

unstructured data, but traditionally IT environments have selected NAS

for unstructured data. NAS storage provides a consistent file system

that allows the same storage space to be accessed by multiple

heterogeneous clients.

Unified Storage combines SAN and NAS protocols in the same physical

hardware chassis and typically has a single management interface. As

unstructured (file) data continues to grow, several challenges with this

approach have emerged. Spikes in NAS storage demand can cause SAN

performance bottlenecks. Unified Storage typically is priced like SAN,

which costs much more in $/GB than traditional NAS. Also, traditional

Unified Storage typically has rigid architectural boundaries that limit

file size, number of files, and size of the file system. Forklift upgrades

to the next generation of Unified Storage require tedious data

migration and often weeks of application and storage network

downtime.

A file system is a software layer running on the controller that manages

how the data is stored and accessed. Because the file system manages

data access, and functions like an operating system for the controller,

its architecture and design directly impact storage system scalability

and performance.

Dell Scalable File System (DSFS), incorporated in PowerVault NX3500, is

uniquely scalable. Based on a scale-out architecture with full

redundancy and no single point of failure, it is designed to present a

storage pool as a single file system with a single IP address to the

client(s) in a flat network topology, or with multiple IP addresses to

clients in a routed network.

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