Dell PowerFlex 4.6.x Technical Overview

Maintain the physical layer

Adding or removing hardware units and configuring them into PowerFlex can result from scale-out, hardware failure, operating system updating, or upgrade and hardware expansion.

In the physical layer, maintenance is limited to adding and removing hardware units and configuring them into PowerFlex. These operations are usually a result of:

• Scaling out when there is a need for additional capacity. This usually results in adding more storage media to the existing servers, or adding additional servers.

• Hardware failure. In cases where there is a hardware (storage media or server) failure and it must be replaced.

  In all the above cases, the operation requires adding or removing storage capacity from the system. In some cases, it may include adding or removing an entire server, and its associated storage media, from the configuration. As far as PowerFlex is concerned, all these activities translate to SDS reconfigurations.

  If the removed server is an SDC node, or the server to be added requires exposing storage locally, SDC reconfiguration will happen as well.

• Adding or removing storage media. Add or remove the media from the SDS with which it is associated. PowerFlex will redistribute the data accordingly and seamlessly.

• Operating system updating, or upgrade or hardware expansions. Graceful shutdown or reboot operations with return to fully operation state flow.