Dell Fluid Cache For Das Based Solution; Table 2. Nfs Server Software And Firmware Configuration - Dell PowerEdge EL Manual

Improving NFS Performance on HPC Clusters with Dell Fluid Cache for DAS
Table 2.
OPERATING SYSTEM
KERNEL VERSION
FILE SYSTEM
SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT
BIOS
iDRAC
PERC H710/PERC H810
FIRMWARE
PERC DRIVER
INFINIBAND FIRMWARE
INFINIBAND DRIVER
The baseline described in this section is very similar to the Dell NSS. One key difference is the use of a
single RAID controller to connect to all four storage arrays. In a pure-NSS environment, two PERC RAID
controllers are recommended for optimal performance. With two PERC cards, the two RAID virtual disks
are combined using Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM). DFC does not support caching of an LVM
device, hence a single PERC was used for this study.
The NFS server and the attached storage arrays are configured and tuned for optimal performance
based on several past studies
Detailed instructions on configuring this storage solution are provided in Appendix A: Step-by-step
configuration of Dell Fluid Cache for NFS.

2.2. Dell Fluid Cache for DAS based solution

The DFC-based NFS solution builds on top of the baseline configuration described in Section 2.1. It
simply adds PCIe SSDs and the DFC software to the baseline configuration. Details of the configuration
are provided in Table 3 and Table 4.
NFS server software and firmware configuration
Software
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.3z
2.6.32-279.14.1.el6.x86_64
Red Hat Scalable File System (XFS) 3.1.1-7
Dell OpenManage Server Administrator 7.1.2
Firmware and Drivers
1.3.6
1.23.23 (Build 1)
21.1.0-0007
megasas 00.00.06.14-rh1
2.11.500
Mellanox OFED 1.5.3-3.1.0
4
. A summary of the design choices is provided in Section 2.4.
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