Dell fluid cache for das based solution, Table 2, Nfs server software and firmware configuration – Dell PowerVault MD1200 User Manual
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Improving NFS Performance on HPC Clusters with Dell Fluid Cache for DAS
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NFS server software and firmware configuration
Table 2.
Software
OPERATING SYSTEM
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.3z
KERNEL VERSION
2.6.32-279.14.1.el6.x86_64
FILE SYSTEM
Red Hat Scalable File System (XFS) 3.1.1-7
SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT
Dell OpenManage Server Administrator 7.1.2
Firmware and Drivers
BIOS
1.3.6
iDRAC
1.23.23 (Build 1)
PERC H710/PERC H810
FIRMWARE
21.1.0-0007
PERC DRIVER
megasas 00.00.06.14-rh1
INFINIBAND FIRMWARE
2.11.500
INFINIBAND DRIVER
Mellanox OFED 1.5.3-3.1.0
The baseline described in this section is very similar to the Dell NSS. One key difference is the use of a
single RAID controller to connect to all four storage arrays. In a pure-NSS environment, two PERC RAID
controllers are recommended for optimal performance. With two PERC cards, the two RAID virtual disks
are combined using Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM). DFC does not support caching of an LVM
device, hence a single PERC was used for this study.
The NFS server and the attached storage arrays are configured and tuned for optimal performance
based on several past studies
. A summary of the design choices is provided in Section 2.4.
Detailed instructions on configuring this storage solution are provided in Appendix A: Step-by-step
configuration of Dell Fluid Cache for NFS.
2.2. Dell Fluid Cache for DAS based solution
The DFC-based NFS solution builds on top of the baseline configuration described in Section 2.1. It
simply adds PCIe SSDs and the DFC software to the baseline configuration. Details of the configuration
are provided in Table 3 and Table 4.