Dell PowerFlex Appliance with PowerFlex 4.x Architecture Overview

Key architecture considerations

Flexible network architecture is a key value proposition of PowerFlex appliance. In addition to vendor (Cisco Nexus, Dell PowerSwitch or customer preferred switches), PowerFlex appliance architecture offers the following network topologies to meet your business needs:

• Access and aggregation
• Leaf-spine

PowerFlex appliance also offers the ability to support both hardware enabled software-defined networking (Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure) and native software-defined networking (VMware NSX).

PowerFlex appliance offers four node configuration types to meet performance, scale, and storage and compute capacity business requirements.

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

Additionally, the above-mentioned nodes can be deployed using one or more of the following resource deployment options and PowerFlex Manager allows you to specify a non-root user when configuring a template for a compute-only, storage-only, or hyperconverged deployment.

• Hyperconverged deployment
• Storage-only deployment
• Two-layer deployment with disaggregated compute and storage only
• Hybrid deployment as a combination of above
• PowerFlex file deployment

PowerFlex appliance can be deployed with either full network automation or partial network automation. With full network automation, PowerFlex Manager configures the node facing ports on the customer network switches, if they are Dell or Cisco Nexus supported switches outlined in System components. Partial network automation is used when you have customer network switches that are not supported by Dell. In this case, you are responsible for configuring the node facing ports along with the rest of your network. The PowerFlex nodes can be fully managed by PowerFlex Manager in either full network automation or partial network automation mode.