Dell EqualLogic FS7500 Technical Manual

Also see for FS7500: Overview Manual Installation and setup Hardware setup

Contents

Dell EqualLogic FS7500 Technical Manual Manual pdf 7 page image

BP1016 Integrating the Dell EqualLogic FS7500 into an Existing SAN 32 Dell EqualLogic FS7500The FS7500 is a dual active/active architecture that consists of a redundant pair of appliance-likecontroller nodes with a backup power supply. The large onboard cache gives the EqualLogic FS7500the ability to scale performance. Each system provides 48GB of RAM (24GB in each controller node)that is used for the operating system and the mirrored, battery protected cache memory. The FS7500can be expanded by adding an additional pair of controllers and new client connections areautomatically load balanced across all nodes.The EqualLogic FS7500 supports all new and existing EqualLogic arrays with firmware version 5.1 andlater. A single FS7500 system can utilize up to eight EqualLogic PS Series Arrays with the ability to addanother FS7500 system into the same namespace to improve file performance. Each EqualLogicFS7500 controller has four 1 Gigabit Ethernet ports for NAS connectivity for NFS and CIFS clients. Fourmore 1 Gigabit ports are used to connect to the EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI SAN. An additional fiveports on each controller are used for internal communications such as IPMI, cluster heartbeat, andcache mirroring.The FS7500 also has built-in snapshot capabilities, using a redirect-on-write method. When asnapshot is enabled, any changes to existing data are preserved in a snapshot, and subsequentread/write access is redirected to the new data area. This method of snapshots is implemented inFluidFS and does not require additional physical disk space for holding snapshots and instead it utilizesreserved, unused space from the existing NAS file system.Although outside of the scope of this document, additional features of the FS7500 also include ActiveDirectory/LDAP integration, NDMP–based backup support, NIS (Network Information Services) anduser quotas.2.1 EqualLogic FS7500 support for Network Attached StorageUntil now, EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI SANs have only supported hosts attached for block storage. Withthe integration of the FS7500, EqualLogic SAN owners can now support NFS and CIFS file I/O as well.Management of the FS7500 is integrated into the EqualLogic Group Manager so that the administratorcan manage both file and block storage from the same application. The EqualLogic Group Managercontinues to use the same user interface, so you do not need to learn a new tool to manage NAS.Traditional file servers, database servers, mail, and other application servers use local or SAN-attachedblock storage. Sometimes a single traditional file server is adequate, however, in other casesperformance, scalability, and even functionality of a single file server can be a limiting factor and usingmultiple file servers may have additional management challenges. With the FS7500, it is possible toconsolidate these multiple file servers down to a single namespace and management entity which caneasily be scaled out to meet performance needs due to the scalable nature of both the underlyingEqualLogic SAN and the FluidFS running on the FS7500.Note: For additional information on the features of the EqualLogic FS7500, see:EqualLogic FS7500 Unified Storage Solutionwww.dell.com/FS7500