Dell PowerFlex Appliance with PowerFlex 4.x Administration Guide

Scalability

PowerFlex file systems can accommodate large amounts of data, directories, and files. The following table shows several of the scalability attributes and limits of file system.

Storage efficiency

All file systems are thinly provisioned and always have compression and deduplication enabled. With thin file systems, only 1.5 GB is allocated upfront for metadata, regardless of how large the file system is. As capacity is consumed on the file system, additional capacity is allocated on demand. This continuously happens until the specified file system size is reached and the file system becomes full.

Compression and deduplication help reduce the total cost of ownership and increase the efficiency of the system by reducing the amount of physical capacity that is needed to store the data. Savings are not only limited to the file system itself, but also to its snapshots and thin clones. Compression and deduplication occur in line between the system cache and the backend drives. The compression task is offloaded to a dedicated chip on the node, which frees up CPU cycles.

Performance

PowerFlex systems are tuned and optimized for high performance across all use cases. In addition, platform components such as Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) drives and dual-socket CPUs enable the system to maintain low response times while servicing large workloads

Shrink and extend

PowerFlex file systems provide increased flexibility by providing the ability to shrink and extend file systems as needed. Shrink and extend operations are used to resize the file system and update the capacity that is seen by the client. Extend operations do not change how much capacity is allocated to the file system. However, shrink operations may be able to reclaim unused space depending on how much capacity is allocated to the file system and the presence of snapshots or thin clones.

If the advertised file system size is too small or full, extending it allows additional data to be written to the file system. If the advertised file system size is too large, shrinking it limits the amount of data that can be written to the file system. For shrink and extend, the minimum value is equal to the used size of the file system and the maximum value is 256 TB. You cannot shrink the file system to less than the used size, as this would cause the client to see the file system as more than 100% full.