Thank you for entrusting one of your most valuable assets, your data with Dell Technologies. My name is David Steining, and I'm a systems engineer within our Unstructured Data Solutions division. I'm going to walk you through some of the major components of your new PowerScale environment, and highlight tips on how to keep it healthy. We are highly customer-focused, and our mission is to help you easily store, manage, protect, and utilize your unstructured data to become more data-driven in this era of digital and IT transformation. To start, I'd like to highlight what makes the PowerScale solutions so powerful. It's the software OneFS, that enables you to store any file-based data anywhere, anytime. OneFS positions your environment to start small, and easily grow to multi petabyte scale. OneFS supports multiple tiers of storage that run on flexible hardware. PowerScale solutions are easy to manage, upgrade, and refresh. When the time comes to refresh or grow the environment, OneFS seamlessly integrates multi-generational hardware and migrates the data to the new gear without disruption. Businesses look to Dell Technologies for their unstructured data storage needs due to our granular, policy-driven single file system powered by OneFS.
With OneFS, you get simple scalability, and the ability to grow your storage in as little as 60 seconds. There are no complex manual interventions needed. PowerScale also provides flexibility in its hardware. To meet multiple business needs simultaneously, you can choose from all-flash, hybrid, or archive nodes. The result is a single file system that provides flexibility to transparently tier for a true data lifecycle. Solutions start at 7 terabyte usable, and can grow to more than 70 petabytes in a single namespace. Next, we will look at the hardware, and help to identify key components to be aware of. There are two models: the chassis-based model and the server- based model.
Your hardware deployment may contain a single node type or a combination of node types in a multi-tier solution. Here is an overview of the PowerScale family of hardware. The server-based and chassis models are all tied together with the OneFS operating system. Available platforms that offer the right balance between price, performance, and capacity, include all-flash, which contains SSD and NVMe-based drives. Hybrid, which is a combination of SSD and spinning disks and archive nodes. Any combination of the PowerScale node types can be leveraged as part of a multi-tier architecture to deliver a complete data lifecycle. We have also extended PowerScale OneFS into the cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Oracle Cloud and Google Cloud through our multi-cloud data services offering.
With our fully integrated native cloud offering for Google Cloud, you can leverage the cloud in situations where you don't necessarily want to spin up a new site with new hardware. This is the front view of a PowerScale chassis model. Each chassis has four nodes. There are 15 drives per node, all contained within drive sleds. There are five sleds per node. Sleds can be removed from the chassis to replace failed drives without impacting access to the data. Now onto the back of the chassis. The node model number is located at the top right corner of each compute suitcase. Each suitcase aligns to the corresponding drive sleds on the front of the chassis. Each node provides a power connection, a management port, drive slots for data and metadata caching SSDs, front-end client network connections, and the back-end Ethernet or InfiniBand networking ports.
Network connections can be 10 gigabit, 25 gigabit, 40 gigabit, or 100 gigabit, depending on the node type. Now on to the F200, one of our server-based PowerScale platforms. When the front bezel is removed, you will see the node contains four SSD drives. On the back of the node, you will find two power supplies, front-end networking, back-end networking, iDRAC, and a serial-based console port. This is our PowerScale F600 Behind the front bezel is where the eight NVMe drives are located. At the back of the node, are the connections for two power supplies, front-end networking, back-end networking, iDRAC, and a serial-based console port. This is the PowerScale F900, our most powerful server-based all-flash node.
When the front bezel is removed, you will see that it contains 24 NVMe drives. Located at the back of the node are connections for two power supplies, front-end networking, back-end networking, iDRAC, and a serial-based console port. Now that we've covered the hardware, let's look at the PoweScale OneFS software that serves as the foundation of our PowerScale enterprise scale out file storage systems. OneFS provides enterprise data management and governance capabilities designed for eliminating data silos. With OneFS, you can centralize your enterprise storage processes, including data management, performance management, data protection, and cyber security. Simply put, OneFS increases the economics of your data storage, lowers ownership cost, reduces risk, and makes it simple to manage your data. Now let's dig in a little more into some of the highlights of OneFS.
OneFS provides robust multi-protocol access to data. Client connections are balanced across the nodes through the front-end networking ports using SmartConnect. In multi-tier environments, SmartPools is a policy-driven mechanism to move data within the cluster. You would use SyncIQ to service any replication to other PowerScale clusters. SnapShotIQ is the feature that provides granular point-in time copy-on-write snapshots of your data. Additional features of the solution include CloudIQ, DataIQ, and InsightIQ. CloudIQ and DataIQ are the key components to provide data insights on an ongoing basis. InsightIQ monitors and collects data about your cluster for use in performance monitoring, capacity trending, and customizable reporting. We encourage you to leverage our strategic management tools to monitor, manage, and trend your storage infrastructure utilization.
Now, let's go through some of the best practices for keeping your PowerScale systems healthy, and ensure you get the most out of your investment. As we prepare for transition to production, there are areas we recommend you focus on. First, verify your login to the support site. That's where you can also sign up for security and technical advisories. Next, you will want to test and verify that Secure Remote Services is connecting and functioning properly. Then, ensure monitoring tools such as InsightIQ, DataIQ, and CloudIQ are deployed. If you need assistance, reach out to your Dell pre-sales systems engineer or sales representative. Now that you're all set up, we have several resources to help you learn more about your PowerScale environment, including tips on ensuring the cluster is running at optimal performance. In our PowerScale Healthy Habits checklist, you will find steps we recommend IT administrators perform on a regular basis as part of daily, monthly, and quarterly reviews.
Of course, these can be adjusted based on your business and utilization of your PowerScale cluster. Some examples from the Healthy Habits Checklist include: Daily, addressing any active alerts. Ensuring capacity remains under recommended thresholds. And addressing hardware situations such as a disk drive failure. On a weekly basis, we suggest monitoring and alerting is operated as desired via InsightIQ, DataIQ, CloudIQ, secure remote services, and email, review snapshots, SyncIQ and SmartPools to ensure no changes are needed. Is it time to consider if code upgrades are needed to be planned for OneFS? Roll-up patches and health check framework. Quarterly reviews are strategic discussions of the cluster, and tend to be more forward-looking in terms of software upgrades, capacity trending, and additional workflow requirements. This includes things like: What is your schedule for Roll-up Patches? When should you plan a OneFS version upgrade based on features, patches, and support life of your current version? External tools that may need to be upgraded.
InsightIQ, DataIQ, CloudIQ, Secure Remote Services, or Superna. Capacity Trending: What's the growth over the last 6-12 months? How does the growth trend over the next 12 months? Do additional nodes need to be added? Will new workflows be added to the cluster over the next three months? And what is the capacity and performance impact? The Healthy Habits checklist is a great framework to provide guidance on key activities that align to daily, weekly, and quarterly management of your PowerScale platforms. We also encourage you to download the Quick Reference Guide on the PowerScale Support site. It will help to find answers and aid in becoming a power user in no time. With your PowerScale investment, you are now part of the PowerScale community. Please remember to take advantage of the various resources available that will help get the most out of your investment and your data. Helpful resources include: User group meetings. Lunch and Learns. Technical whitepapers, and more. We also offer many education and certification options across the Dell Technologies portfolio, which helps to get the most out of your investment.
Thank you once again for your purchase, and for allowing Dell Technologies to help drive more innovation with your data, and create new value for your organization.
