Node components

As a rack-mountable appliance, a pre-Generation 6 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. A PowerScale cluster is made up of three or more nodes, up to 144. The 4U chassis is always used for Generation 6. There are four nodes in one 4U chassis in Generation 6, therefore a quarter chassis makes up one node.

When you add a node to a pre-Generation 6 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 Generation 6 is four nodes and Generation 6 does not use NVRAM. Journals are stored in RAM and M.2 flash is used for a backup in case of node failure.

The PowerScale F200 and F600 nodes are 1U models that require a minimum cluster size of three nodes. PowerScale F900 nodes are 2U models that require a minimum cluster size of three nodes. Clusters can be expanded to a maximum of 252 nodes in single node increments.

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
PowerScale F200 (The F200 is supported with OneFS 9.0.0.0 and later releases only) All-flash solution, software inline data compression, and data deduplication.
PowerScale F600 (The F600 is supported with OneFS 9.0.0.0 and later releases only) All-flash solution, software inline data compression, and data deduplication.
Isilon F800 and F810 (The F810 is supported with OneFS 8.1.3 and with OneFS 8.2.1 and later releases only)

PowerScale F900, supported with OneFS 9.2.1.0 and later releases only.

All-flash solution, fast data access using direct-attached NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) SSDs with integrated parallelism.

Hardware data compression and data deduplication on the F810.

Software inline data compression and data deduplication on the F900.

Isilon Hardware H-Series
  • H600, performance spinning solution
  • H500, performance capacity
  • H400, capacity performance
  • H5600, large capacity in a performance node, data compression: requires PowerScale 8.2.2 and later releases for in-line compression and in-line deduplication support)
PowerScale Hardware H-series, supported with OneFS 9.2.1.0 and later releases only.
  • H700, performance solution, support for inline software data compression and data deduplication
  • H7000, performance solution, support for inline software data compression and data deduplication
Isilon Hardware A-Series
  • A200, active archive
  • A2000, deep archive
PowerScale Hardware A-Series, supported with OneFS 9.2.1.0 and later releases only
  • A300, active archive
  • A3000, deep archive
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 Dell Technologies PowerScale 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