Dell FluidFS V3 NAS Solutions For PowerVault NX3500, NX3600, And NX3610Administrator's Guide

Shared back‐end infrastructure

The MD system SAN and NX36X0 scale‐out NAS leverage the same virtualized disk pool.

Unified block and file

Unified block (SAN) and file(NAS) storage.

High performance NAS

Support for a single namespace spanning up to two NAS appliances (four NAS controllers).

Capacity scaling

Ability to scale a single namespace up to 1024 TB capacity.

Connectivity options

1GbE and 10GbE, copper and optical options for connectivity to the client network.

Highly available and active‐active design

Redundant, hot‐swappable NAS controllers in each NAS appliance. Both NAS controllers in a NAS appliance process I/O. BPS allows maintaining data integrity in the event of a power failure by keeping a NAS controller online long enough to write the cache to the internal storage device.

Automatic load balancing

Automatic balancing of client connections across network ports and NAS controllers, as well as back‐end I/O across MD array LUNs.

Multi‐protocol support

Support for CIFS/SMB (on Windows) and NFS (on UNIX and Linux) protocols with ability to share user data across both protocols.

Client authentication

Control access to files using local and remote client authentication, including LDAP, Active Directory, and NIS.

Quota rules

Support for controlling client space usage.

File security style

Choice of file security mode for a NAS volume (UNIX or NTFS).

Cache mirroring

The write cache is mirrored between NAS controllers, which ensures a high performance response to client requests and maintains data integrity in the event of a NAS controller failure.

Journaling mode

In the event of a NAS controller failure, the cache in the remaining NAS controller is written to storage and the NAS controller continues to write directly to storage, which protects against data loss.

NAS volume thin clones

Clone NAS volumes without the need to physically copy the data set.

Deduplication

Policy‐driven post‐process deduplication technology that eliminates redundant data at rest.

Compression

LZPS (Level Zero Processing System) compression algorithm that intelligently shrinks data at rest.

Metadata protection

Metadata is constantly check-summed and stored in multiple locations for data consistency and protection.

Replication

NAS-volume level, snapshot‐based, asynchronous replication to enable disaster recovery.

Snapshots

Redirect‐on‐write, user‐accessible snapshots

NDMP backups

Snapshot‐based, asynchronous backup (remote NDMP) over Ethernet to certified third‐party backup solutions.

Anti‐virus scanning

CIFS anti‐virus scanning by deploying certified third‐party ICAP‐enabled anti‐virus solutions.

Monitoring

Built‐in performance monitoring and capacity planning.