Dell EqualLogic FS7500 NAS Scalability and Deployment Guide - User Manual
Summary
The Dell EqualLogic Best Practices Series whitepaper covers scalability and deployment best practices for the EqualLogic FS7500 NAS system as a file share solution. It provides technical guidance on unified storage architecture, deployment scenarios, scalability considerations, and integration with existing infrastructure. The document is intended for storage architects, IT administrators, and infrastructure engineers designing and implementing Dell EqualLogic unified storage solutions in enterprise environments.
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Dell Equal Logic Best Practices Series
Scalability & Deployment Best Practices for the Dell Equal Logic FS7500 NAS System as a File Share Solution A Dell Technical Whitepaper
Storage Infrastructure and Solutions Engineering Dell Product Group February 2012
Page Summary Contents For Dell EqualLogic FS7500 NAS Scalability and Deployment Guide - User Manual
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Dell Equal Logic Best Practices Series Scalability & Deployment Best Practices for the Dell Equal Logic FS7500 NAS System as a File Share Solution A Dell Technical Whitepaper Storage Infrastructur...
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THIS WHITE PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS AND TECHNICAL INACCURACIES. THE CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND. ...
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Table of Contents 1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................................... 2 1.1 Audience ...
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Acknowledgements This whitepaper was produced by the PG Storage Infrastructure and Solutions team between March 2011 and August 2011 at the Dell Labs facility in Round Rock, Texas. The team that creat...
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1 Introduction The Dell™ Equal Logic™ FS75001 adds Network Attached Storage (NAS) capabilities to the Equal Logic PS Series2 product line. Working with PS Series arrays, the FS7500 provides a high per...
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1.2 The rest of this paper The rest of this paper contains the following sections: Section 2, Overview of the Dell Equal Logic FS7500 Unified Storage Solution, on page 4 Section 3, Test methodolog...
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2 Overview of the Dell Equal Logic FS7500 Unified Storage Solution The FS7500 is a high performance unified storage solution that integrates with new and existing Equal Logic PS Series storage arrays ...
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customer’s backup environment with support for Network Data Management Protocol5 (NDMP) backup. As with all Dell Equal Logic products, the FS7500’s NAS feature set, software licensing and future firmw...
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• It uses a single Equal Logic storage pool. Only one storage pool in the Equal Logic storage group can be used for allocating the NAS reserve. • It is formatted with Dell Fluid File system (Fluid FS)...
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3 Test methodology The test methodology used to derive the results of this paper was comprised of two parts: 1. The creation of NFS exports or CIFS file shares on the Dell Equal Logic FS7500 Unified S...
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Table 1 File Size distribution Size Percent Less than 4KB 50% 4KB - 32KB 22% 32KB - 256KB 28% Note: The design of the data set as well as the distribution of NFS and CIFS file operations during each t...
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Table 3 CIFS Simulation: File System Operation Distribution Operation Type Percent READ_ANDX 20% WRITE_ANDX 9% OTHER7 71% Distribution: READ Only Less than 4KB 60% 4KB - 32KB 20% 32KB - 256KB 20% Dist...
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4 Test hardware configurations This section outlines the major system hardware components involved in the simulations. These are illustrated in the figures below. Figure 3 illustrates one of the small...
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Figure 3: Test setup using two Equal Logic FS7500 Controllers and two Equal Logic PS6500E arrays BP1015 Scalability & Deployment Best Practices for the Dell Equal Logic FS7500 NAS System 11
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Figure 4: Test setup using four Equal Logic FS7500 Controllers and eight Equal Logic PS6000XV arrays BP1015 Scalability & Deployment Best Practices for the Dell Equal Logic FS7500 NAS System 12
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4.1 Network configuration The connection paths from a single NAS node (FS7500 controller) to both the LAN and SAN are shown in Figure 5 below. The figure also details the connection paths for the Equa...
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4.1.1 NAS node NICs Four NICs are dedicated on each NAS node for each of the networks – SAN, client and internal. The connectivity of each of these NICS is shown in Figure 5 above. Refer to PS online ...
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• The LAN was configured as single layer 2 network using the default VLAN. The default MAC based load-balancing mode (ALB) was used for distributing file system traffic across the FS7500 nodes. • Flow...
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5 Test simulations A series of NFS and CIFS simulations were conducted to study the scalability and performance behavior of the NAS solution varying the number of NAS nodes, number of PS Series arrays...
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Figure 6: PS6000XV RAID10 NFS scalability The results presented in Figure 6 show the following scaling characteristics: • Using a single FS7500 system, four arrays yielded 33% more operations per seco...
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comparison we doubled the number of the PS Series arrays from four to eight arrays and doubled the number of FS7500 controllers from two to four. From these results we can conclude the following: • Sc...
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The results presented in Figure 7 show the following scaling characteristics: • Using a single FS7500 system, four arrays yielded 38% more operations per second than two arrays. In this comparison we ...
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Table 5 PS6000XV RAID 50 Scalability Test Configurations Total File File Total File Data Test Workload System System System Set Size Client Configuration Type Size (TB) Count Size (TB) (TB) Count 1 x ...
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• RAID 10 performed approximately 30% to 35% better than RAID 50 in the first three configurations. This difference was due to the extra I/O write operations necessary to maintain RAID50 parity blocks...
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Figure 9 below shows the NFS achieved operations per second for the configurations using a % relative scale from the minimal system configuration. Total average client response time across all file op...
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• When using two FS7500 systems and eight PS6500E arrays we were able to achieve a 56% performance improvement over using one FS7500 and four PS6500E arrays. In this comparison we doubled the number o...
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• Using four PS6500E systems and two FS7500 systems we were able to support 69% more operations per second than when using a single FS7500 system. In this comparison the number of PS Series arrays (fo...
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Figure 11: NFS Block Size Variation As seen in Figure 11, the achieved operations per second with 32KB block size was 17% greater than that for 8KB block size. This difference is due to the processing...
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Figure 12: Client network MTU Variation As seen in Figure 12, there was virtually no difference when varying client side MTU size. This is primarily due to the random nature of the file I/O workload s...
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Figure 13 below shows the percent difference in NFS achieved operations per second for the configurations in a normalized scale. Total average client response time across all file operations remained ...
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5.7 NFS data and meta-data mix The default mix of NFS operations in our test simulations was 28% data and 72% meta-data. Data operations are the actual read and write I/O operations to files. They inc...
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5.8 Sequential write I/O simulation Studies were conducted to understand the maximum sequential I/O throughput of the solution using I/O simulation on CIFS shares. The I/O simulation tool used was IOM...
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Figure 16: CIFS IOMeter sequential write throughput With two nodes 92% of the available client network bandwidth was utilized, offering close to line rate utilization. With four nodes, about 54% of th...
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6 Best practices In this section we provide best practice design and deployment recommendations based on the test results presented in this paper. 6.1 Network You should use separate network infrastru...
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4. Enable jumbo frames (MTU 9216) on the switch ports connecting to the FS7500 client network NIC ports to assist with sequential file I/O requests. If enabled, ensure jumbo frames is enabled across t...
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Appendix A A.1 Test system components The table below provides details for the major hardware and software system components used in the test system configuration. Table 12 Test System Configuration D...
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A.2 IP and Subnet information Table 13 Test Network IP Configuration Entity Subnet IP Address 1 IP Address 2 IP Address 3 IP Address 4 NAS Service IP 172.16.101.x 172.16.101.100 NAS Node Client Networ...
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Related Publications The following Dell publications are referenced in this document or are recommended sources for additional information. The Dell Equal Logic FS7500 Unified Storage Solution http:...
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THIS WHITE PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS AND TECHNICAL INACCURACIES. THE CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND.
Manual Details
| Brand | Dell |
|---|---|
| Pages | 39 |
| File Size | 1.28 MB |
| Published | June 24, 2026 |
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Frequently Asked Questions
How is the FS7500 network architecture configured?
It uses a dual-port network with separate internal and external networks for NAS services and management.
What is the purpose of the test methodology section?
It details storage pool configuration, NAS reserve settings, and various performance simulations for CIFS and NFS.
What are the supported RAID levels for scalability testing?
The document tests scalability for RAID 10, RAID 50, and RAID 6 configurations.