Dell PowerFlex 4.5.x Technical Overview

NVMe hosts

PowerFlex supports connecting and consuming storage from NVMe hosts. An NVMe host is a host running an operating system that supports NVMe over TCP.

PowerFlex supports connection to storage using SDC or NVMe hosts. Both are supported provided they do not use the same volume.

Once an NVMe host is created in PowerFlex, volumes can be mapped to that host. From that point, the NVMe host can connect to and consume storage.

The following host parameters are configurable for:

• Number of connections

  For hosts that are expected to generate high I/O load, you may increase the default value.

• Number of paths per volume

  Configurable host attribute is up to eight paths. This is mostly an operating system limit per volume and per total paths.

PowerFlex supports specifying networks that might fail together. NVMe over TCP connections are allocated to the NVMe over TCP hosts through multiple network sets, which offer resiliency to the failure of a network set.

NVMe over TCP supports fault sets. Connections allocated to the NVMe over TCP host are through targets on multiple fault sets that provide path resiliency to a fault set failure.