Powervault Nx3500 Solution Architecture; Powervault Nx3500 Nas Volumes - Dell PowerVault NX3500 Technical Manual

Transition Guide for PowerVault MD3200i and MD3220i Series Arrays

3. PowerVault NX3500 Solution Architecture

The PowerVault NX3500 system is based on a NAS gateway architecture
with the hardware residing on three physically separate components:
PowerVault NX3500 controller0
•
PowerVault NX3500 controller1
•
Backup power supply
•
A unified storage system based on the PowerVault NX3500 and
o
MD3xx0i hardware would include:
• Two PowerVault NX3500 controllers with 12 GB cache per controller
• Backup power supply
• iSCSI-based storage, the NX3500 system currently supports 1 MD3xx0i array
and multiple MD120x0 expansion shelves
iSCSI connections
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Two internal networks
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Client network
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4. PowerVault NX3500 NAS Volumes

A NAS volume is a subset of the file system and comprises a virtual unit
of storage capacity that is less than or equal to the total available
space. The minimum size of a NAS volume is 20 MB and the maximum
size is the total amount of available space on the backend storage
system. You can increase the capacity of a NAS volume without
impacting data access or bringing down your SAN.
You may choose to create one large NAS volume or, alternatively, you
can use multiple NAS volumes (creating, growing, and deleting them as
required). The PowerVault NX3500 supports up to 512 NAS volumes per
solution. The size of a file system can be increased at any time but may
not be decreased in the initial release of the product. However, NAS
volume size may be increased or decreased anytime. To make NAS
volumes available to users, each volume must be shared (CIFS) or
exported (NFS) separately. Users need to specifically map or mount
each share.
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