Dell PowerFlex Appliance with PowerFlex 3.x Architecture Overview

System features

PowerFlex appliance uses PowerFlex, which uses the local disks of existing PowerFlex nodes to create a storage pool. It is designed to scale to thousands of PowerFlex nodes.

The integrated scalable network architecture is available with a choice of the following:

• Hardware consisting of Cisco Nexus switches, Dell PowerSwitch switches, or customer switches

• Bandwidth depending on the customer needs

• Network configurations

  • Trunk
  • Channel-group
  • Channel-group with LACP

• Complete flexibility in designing the converged system with the following options:

  • PowerFlex hyperconverged nodes
  • PowerFlex storage-only nodes
  • PowerFlex compute-only nodes

• Supports 10 GbE, 25 GbE or 100 GbE ports for backend connectivity

• Supports native asynchronous replication between sites

• PowerFlex nodes supports SSD and NVMe drive technologies

• Improved node maintenance using protected maintenance mode (PMM)

• Supports self-encrypting drives (SEDs) enabled by Dell CloudLink

• Supports horizontal scaling by adding PowerFlex nodes to extend storage or compute capacity

• Secure and scalable storage using PowerFlex

  • Seamlessly increase storage capacity or performance with horizontal node scaling
  • Optional data compression feature that improves storage efficiency
  • Optional Data at Rest Encryption (D@RE) feature provides data security using CloudLink as a software encryption layer, or as a key manager for self-encrypting drives

• End-to-end lifecycle management with PowerFlex Manager

• For the PowerFlex management controller 2.0, an optional three-node PowerFlex management controller supporting VMware ESXi and PowerFlex is available for shared storage layer, providing HA for the VM workloads on the PowerFlex management controller. The PowerFlex management nodes are based on PowerFlex R650 nodes and H755 RAID controller.
• Supports Fibre Channel HBAs on PowerFlex nodes to connect to external storage arrays (outside the PowerFlex datapath) for migrating the data from external storage arrays to PowerFlex
• PowerFlex supports multi-subnet or multi-VLAN for all network types other than data, vSAN, and NSX overlay
• PowerFlex supports multiple Cisco and Dell switch models with different firmware and operating system versions