Dell PowerStore Planning Guide

PowerStore Clusters

A PowerStore cluster is a group of one to four appliances acting as a single component for resource management, efficiency, and availability purposes. A cluster can contain up to four appliances. In this release, you can only have appliances of the same configuration in one cluster.

The following diagram shows the components of a cluster:

A cluster provides the following benefits:

• Reduced management complexity.
• Enhanced performance and resource efficiency—Compute and storage resources are pooled within a cluster and the resources usage is balanced across the appliances in the cluster. Resources are rebalanced to maintain and optimize the performance and resource usage on the cluster. Rebalancing is done based on the storage space usage trends and system performance evaluations occurring in the backend.
• Scalability—Start with a small configuration and add capacity or performance to the system by adding more appliances later to meet business demand.

To manage and configure a cluster, perform the following operations in PowerStore Manager:

• Monitor and review aggregated metrics for the cluster on the Dashboard page.
• Review and configure various settings for your cluster on the Settings page.
• Add appliances to or remove them from the cluster Hardware page.