Dell PowerFlex Appliance with PowerFlex 4.x Architecture Overview

Overview

PowerFlex appliance is an engineered system designed to meet modern data center needs. You have flexibility in deploying two layer (separate compute-only and storage-only nodes), fully converged, storage-only, PowerFlex file nodes or hybrid combinations. PowerFlex allows for block and file storage within the same system.

PowerFlex appliance is a modular software-defined compute and storage platform that enables linear performance with scale and flexible deployment options for next-generation cloud applications and mixed workloads. The scale-out architecture of the PowerFlex appliance enables you to add PowerFlex nodes with various CPU, memory, and drive configuration options to meet the business need. PowerFlex appliance is designed for deployments involving large numbers of virtualized and bare metal workloads. PowerFlex appliance is built-in N+1 redundancy at component level to deliver high availability.

PowerFlex appliance has many advantages:

• Engineered system with automated end-to-end life cycle management using PowerFlex Manager
• Choice of the following network topologies to meet scale and performance business needs:
  • Access and aggregation
  • Leaf-spine
• Choice of network hardware: Cisco Nexus switches, Dell PowerSwitch switches or customer preferred switches
• Multiple PowerFlex node types and node configurations options to meet compute and storage needs:
  • PowerFlex hyperconverged nodes
  • PowerFlex storage-only nodes
  • PowerFlex compute-only nodes
  • PowerFlex file nodes
• Flexible compute and storage resources deployment options such as
  • Hyperconverged - compute and storage in same chassis allowing proportional scale
  • Two layer - compute and storage deployed in separate chassis allowing independent scale of compute and storage resources
  • Storage only - only storage resources are part of PowerFlex appliance; compute resides outside the system boundaries
  • Hybrid - combination of two or more of the above deployment options
• Highly available management and orchestration (M&O) control plane that runs on a dedicated three or more physical nodes cluster

  • Cost effective management and orchestration that runs on a single physical PowerFlex management node.

  • Use of your existing servers for management and orchestration

• Supports VMware ESXi and bare metal options
• Software and hardware-based data at rest encryption (D@RE) options
  • Dell CloudLink
  • Optional SEDs
• Supports 25 GbE or 100 GbE port bandwidth for backend connectivity
• Dual network environment using your existing software-defined network (SDN), such as Cisco ACI (optional) or VMware NSX
• Supports both block and file storage
• Supports native asynchronous replication between sites
• Built-in component level redundancy to ensure data availability
• Self-healing architecture with integrated call home feature
• Storage only option allows external compute resources to access data in the PowerFlex appliance
• PowerFlex nodes support:
  • SSD
  • NVMe technologies
  • Software defined persistent memory (SDPM) for PowerFlex R760 and R660 nodes
  • NVDIMM for PowerFlex R750 and R650 nodes
• Supports multi-VLAN or multi-subnet for the same network type, other than data networks, vSAN, and NSX overlay
• Supports non-root user, SSH key pairs and LDAP users for PowerFlex administration functions for security
• PowerFlex file supports the following:
  • NAS server and filesystem clone
  • File-level retention (FLR)
  • Multi-tenancy