The following Q&A was compiled from “Ask the Expert: Isilon – Perfect NAS storage platform (Chinese Version)”.

Question 1: Which providers are supported by Isilon OneFS for authentication? What protocols are supported by Isilon OneFS for file access?

Answer:

OneFS supports concurrent multiple authentication provider types. OneFS is often configured to authenticate windows clients with Active Directory and to authenticate UNIX clients with LDAP. You can also configure NIS to authenticate users and groups.

Multi-protocol support in OneFS enables files and directories on the Isilon cluster to be accessed through SMB for windows file sharing, NFS for UNIX file sharing, FTP, and HTTP.

Question 2: What is different between Isilon and VNX-File? According to the different environment, which node type can be recommended?

Answer:

First, Isilon OneFS operation system based on FreeBSD, each node in the cluster includes CPU, memory, storage and network. OneFS combines the three layers of traditional storage architectures—file system, volume manager, and data protection—into one unified software layer, creating a single intelligent file system that spans all nodes within a cluster.

Compare with VNX-File, the features of Isilon are as follows:

1. Isilon operation system is OneFS which is a single distributed file system based on FreeBSD.

2. Instead of using traditional RAID technology, OneFS use JOB to protect data.

3. Client can easily manage the entire file system through accessing any node in Isilon cluster. All nodes in the cluster are peers.

4. There aren't partition and volume in the Isilon.

Currently, Isilon is divided into three series:

S-series: Supporting high IOPS tasks such as visual effects production and hosting MAM virtualized server image.

X-series: Supporting high-performance sequential file access and highly parallelized concurrent client access from MAM services, such as transcoding media assets to create proxy asset versions for browsing.

NL-series: Supporting High density storage for backup and archive.

Question 3:Could you please introduce EMCopy?

Answer:

EMCopy is an EMC tool used to copy files, directories and sub-directories from a source to a target server. In addition, we can copy ACL permission, file owner information and time stamp during copying data. it supports multi-threaded mode and enhanced file comparison.

EMCopy usage:

emcopy.exe [option]

The command “emcopy.exe /?” can get more option for EMCopy.

Question 4:How can Isilon protect data?

Answer:

OneFS uses the Reed Solomon algorithm for N+M protection. In the N+M data protection model, N represents the number of data-stripe units, and M represents the number of simultaneous node or drive failures—or a combination of node and drive failures—that the cluster can withstand without incurring data loss. N must be larger than M.

OneFS also supports N+M:B. In the N+M:B notation, M is the number of disk failures, and B is the number of node failures.

For example:

N+2: means the cluster can lose two drives on different nodes or lose two nodes without losing data.

N+2:1: means the cluster can lose two drives on different nodes or lose one node without losing data.

N+3:1: means the cluster can lose three drives on different nodes or lose one node without losing data.

If a node or drive fails, the cluster protection status is considered to be in a degraded state until the data is protected by OneFS again. OneFS reprotects data by rebuilding data in the free space of the cluster. Because data is rebuilt in the free space of the cluster, the cluster does not require a dedicated hot-spare node or drive in order to recover from a component failure. Because a certain amount of free space is required to rebuild data, it is recommended that you reserve adequate free space through the virtual hot spare feature.

The following table describes the estimated amount of overhead depending on the requested protection and the size of the cluster or node pool.

Question 5: How can I calculate the free space of the cluster, IO throughput and IO-usage?

Answer:

We can get the free space of the cluster, IO throughput and IO-usage from OneFS command line.

(1). the free space of the cluster

For example, we can see three indexes in the following figure.

1. The usage capacity of the entire cluster.

2. The usage capacity of each node.

3. The network throughput of each node.

(2). IO and network throughput

For example, we can get IO and network throughput by the Isilon command. the following is an example to query of NFSv3:

shanghai-2# isistatistics protocol --protocols=nfs3  --orderby=TimeAvg

   Ops   In   Out TimeAvg TimeStdDev Node Proto          Class     Op

   N/s   B/s   B/s      us         us

  11.4   29K  1.6K  3198.9     2103.2    5  nfs3          write  write

  16.7 801.7  541K  2092.6     5331.7    1  nfs3           read   read

186.6  1.3M   25K  1585.8     2853.1    2  nfs3          write  write

957.1  4.4M  130K  1416.3     2797.0    1  nfs3          write  write

   0.7  28.7  69.0   218.8      128.6    1  nfs3 namespace_readaccess

   4.3 208.1  235K   202.1       36.2    2  nfs3           read   read

(3). Availability

For example, we can get the available information by the Isilon command.

shanghai-2# disi-I diskpool list  -v

Name                      Id  Type ProtFlagsMembers              VHS   HDD Used / Size       SSD Used / Size

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

x200_6tb_48gb             18  G    +2   -DH-  17,19                1      1.3T /  8.9T (15%  )     0 /     0 (n/a  )

x200_6tb_48gb:17          17  D    +2   ----  1-2:bay1-6           -      528G /  4.9T (11%  )     0 /     0 (n/a  )

.......

Question 6: Could you please introduce the software modules of Isilon?

Answer:

The following software modules do not require any additional installation. If you need to use these features, you can activate it using license.

Here are some common modules as follows:

InsightIQ:

The InsightIQvirtual appliance monitors and analyzes the performance of your Isilon cluster to help you optimize storage resources and forecast capacity.

SmartConnect advanced:

If you activate a SmartConnect Advanced license, you can balance policies to evenly distribute CPU usage, client connections, or throughput. You can also define IP address pools to support multiple DNS zones in a subnet. In addition, SmartConnect supports IP failover, also known as NFS failover.

SmartPools:

SmartPools enable you to create multiple file pools governed by file-pool policies. The policies move files and directories among node pools or tiers. You can also define how OneFS handles write operations when a node pool or tier is full.

SmartQuotas:

The SmartQuotasmodule tracks disk usage with reports and enforces storage limits with alerts.

SnapshotIQ:

SnapshotIQ protects data with a snapshot—a logical copy of data stored on a cluster. A snapshot can be restored to its top-level directory.

                                                                                                                                              

Translator: Jeffey