PowerScale and ObjectScale customers frequently ask both Dell and their IT solutions ISVs about application compatibility with their storage. This document provides a standard response to help answer these questions.

Dell customer-facing, PowerScale and ObjectScale customers and partners, ISVs.

Dell Technologies and the authors of this document welcome your feedback on this document. Contact the Dell Technologies team by email.

Author: David Hartley

Note: For links to other documentation for this topic, see PowerScale Protocols Infohub,  ObjectScale Data Access Guide.

These applications are compatible with PowerScale and ObjectScale if:

1. They conform to the standards for the data access protocol/API used.
2. They do not depend on aspects of the protocol/API that Dell documents as not supported.

• This applies particularly to PowerScale and ObjectScale S3 support relative to AWS S3.
• However, the S3 subset supported by PowerScale and ObjectScale is being actively extended.

If using the File System Configuration API, we recommend that these applications leverage the supported API versioning to ensure backwards compatibility across OneFS versions.

The File System Access API is not versioned.

For implementation assistance, see the data access documentation for PowerScale and ObjectScale.

We no longer automatically validate ISV partners against all new PowerScale and ObjectScale releases. Data access protocols/APIs are stable entities defined by standards that include backward compatibility, and the products conform to these standards.

We now require ISVs to self-validate against our platforms, and ELab Navigator now points to ISV web sites for certification information. For efficiency and clarity, we encourage validation to be against PowerScale LTS releases and ObjectScale target code releases. ISVs may wish to self-certify against intermediate releases if:

• The ISV has never been tested against a given data access protocol/API.
• The ISV leverages data access protocol/API functionality that is newly available.
• The ISV has added support for an additional data access protocol/API or new functionality within a data access protocol/API.

For a summary of ISV self-certification, refer to the E-LAB UDS portal.

Dell stands behind our documented data access compatibility. If a customer encounters an issue running an application against PowerScale or ObjectScale, and the application vendor believes the root cause lies with the storage, then Dell will investigate and help to resolve the issue consistent with the customer’s Dell Support Contract for their PowerScale or ObjectScale deployment.

Table 1.      Data access protocol changes across PowerScale and ObjectScale releases

OneFS implements NFS versions 3, 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2 to the RFC protocol standard. Meaning that all mandatory features are implemented, but not necessarily the optional ones. All NFSv4.2 features are optional and so not supported in OneFS, but all the mandatory features for NFSv4.1 and below can be accessed via OneFS NFSv4.2. OneFS also implements NFS over RDMA.

See PowerScale OneFS Supportability and Compatibility Guide and PowerScale OneFS NFS Design Considerations and Best Practices.

OneFS conforms to SMB specifications and implements SMB dialects 1, CIFS, 2 and 3.x to 3.1.1. It also implements SMB multichannel, symbolic links, server-side copy, file filtering, continuous availability and encryption.

See PowerScale OneFS Supportability and Compatibility Guide and Dell PowerScale: Solution Design and Considerations for SMB Environments.

OneFS implements a subset of the AWS S3 API. Because the API is intended to enable S3 access to filesystem data, the subset is some 25% of the full AWS capabilities but is being extended as needed (e.g. WORM).

See Dell PowerScale: OneFS S3 API Guide.

OneFS supports multiple distros of Hadoop’s HDFS plus implementations from other vendors. Cloudera self-certify against OneFS.

See OneFS Hadoop Info Hub and  PowerScale OneFS HDFS Reference Guide.

This API has not changed across currently supported OneFS releases and is sufficiently stable that API versioning is not supported.

See PowerScale API Documentation.

For all ObjectScale protocols, see the ObjectScale Data Access Guide.

ObjectScale implements a subset of the AWS S3 API that is continually extended as needed.

Supports the Centera CAS SDK as of the CAS build in the documentation.

Supported subset with platform-specific extensions, two unsupported calls.