Introduction; Audience - Dell EqualLogic FS7500 Technical Manual

1 Introduction

The Dell™ EqualLogic™ FS7500 adds scale-out unified Network Attached Storage (NAS) capabilities to
EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI SANs so you can easily enable and manage iSCSI, CIFS, and NFS access
from a single management console. The EqualLogic FS7500 incorporates the Dell Fluid File System
(FluidFS), which is designed to optimize file access performance and hardware utilization while
eliminating capacity constraints. FluidFS is a high-performance scale-out file system capable of
presenting a single file-system namespace through a virtual IP address, regardless of the number of
NAS controller nodes in the cluster.
The FS7500 attaches to an EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI SAN and can be deployed with new arrays, or it
can leverage an existing EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI SAN deployment. Unlike many unified storage
solutions that only scale in capacity, the EqualLogic FS7500 can scale capacity and performance.
When more storage capacity or I/O performance is required, adding more EqualLogic arrays or
another FS7500 controller pair enables the system to scale out to meet those needs.
While many NAS solutions have strict limits on file share size, FluidFS has no such limitations and the
FS7500 allows a single file system to use the entire capacity
EqualLogic products, the entire feature set of the FS7500, software licensing, and future firmware
enhancements are all included in the base price.
When integrating the FS7500 into an existing SAN, you need to understand the potential impacts to
the existing SAN.
The goal of this paper is to understand:
•
What is the performance impact of adding file I/O to an existing block-based SAN with
additional hosts attached?
•
Is it OK to mix block and file I/O in the same pool, or is it better to keep them separated?
•
How much does adding additional arrays to an existing shared pool benefit the overall SAN
performance?
•
How much free space is required for the FS7500?
•
How many additional network ports are required when integrating the FS7500 into an existing
SAN?
The results presented in this paper can be used as a guideline to help you determine the right answers
for your own environment.

1.1 Audience

This white paper is intended for storage administrators who are involved in the planning and
implementation of integrating a Dell EqualLogic FS7500 into an existing EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI
SAN. Readers should be familiar with general concepts of the Dell EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI storage
as well as Ethernet Local Area Network (LAN) and basic NAS concepts.
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Maximum of 509TB usable today
BP1016
Integrating the Dell EqualLogic FS7500 into an Existing SAN
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of an EqualLogic pool. As with all Dell
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