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Dell PowerFlex Appliance with PowerFlex 4.x Administration Guide

PowerFlex file storage

PowerFlex file uses virtualized file servers that are called NAS servers. A NAS server contains the configuration, interfaces, and environmental information that is used to facilitate access to the file systems.

File storage is managed through NAS servers, which must be created prior to creating file systems. NAS servers can be created to support SMB protocol, NFS protocol, or both. Once NAS servers are created, you can create file systems as containers for your SMB shares for Windows users, or NFS exports for UNIX users.

A file system represents set of storage resources that provide network file storage. The storage system establishes a file system that Windows users or Linux/UNIX hosts can connect to and use for file-based storage. Users access a file system through its shares, which draw from the total storage that is allocated to the file system.

High availability

New NAS servers are automatically assigned on a round-robin basis across the available nodes. The primary node acts as a marker to indicate the node that the NAS server should be running on, based on this algorithm. Once provisioned, the primary node for a NAS server never changes. Backup node, on which the NAS server is backed up for fault tolerance purposes. This means that the NAS server will be moved to this node during any failover event, the node is chosen during NAS server creation by automatic load balancing logic.


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