Isilon node components
As a rack-mountable appliance, a pre-6th Generation hardware storage node includes the following components in a 2U or 4U rack-mountable chassis with an LCD front panel: CPUs, RAM, NVRAM, network interfaces, InfiniBand adapters, disk controllers, and storage media. An Isilon cluster is made up of three or more nodes, up to 144. The 4U chassis is always used for 6th Generation hardware. There are four nodes in one 4U chassis in 6th Generation hardware, therefore a quarter chassis makes up one node.
When you add a node to a pre-6th Generation hardware cluster, you increase the aggregate disk, cache, CPU, RAM, and network capacity. OneFS groups RAM into a single coherent cache so that a data request on a node benefits from data that is cached anywhere. NVRAM is grouped to write data with high throughput and to protect write operations from power failures. As the cluster expands, spindles and CPU combine to increase throughput, capacity, and input-output operations per second (IOPS). The minimum cluster for 6th Generation hardware is four nodes and 6th Generation hardware does not use NVRAM. Journals are stored in RAM and M.2 flash is used for a backup in case of node failure.
There are several types of nodes, all of which can be added to a cluster to balance capacity and performance with throughput or IOPS:
Node
|
Use Case
|
|---|---|
Gen-6 Hardware F800
|
All flash solution
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Gen-6 Hardware H-Series
|
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Gen-6 Hardware A-Series
|
|
S-Series
|
IOPS-intensive applications
|
X-Series
|
High-concurrency and throughput-driven workflows
|
NL-Series
|
Near-primary accessibility, with near-tape value
|
HD-Series
|
Maximum capacity
|
The following EMC Isilon nodes improve performance:
Node
|
Function
|
|---|---|
A-Series Performance Accelerator
|
Independent scaling for high performance
|
A-Series Backup Accelerator
|
High-speed and scalable backup-and-restore solution for tape drives over Fibre Channel connections
|