I’ll receive our first zNAS from Compellent next week, but I would like to start a short series of articles anticipating some features of the new box.
zNAS is the new, ZFS based, NAS head from Compellent, it’s an optional component of the Compellent Storage Center SAN to realize a unified storage system. With “unified storage system” I don’t mean a unified box (they are indeed different boxes) but a system that looks like a single logical entity capable to deliver volumes for block and file access.
It uses the standard Compellent licensing model (per active disks) and it is managed from NMV (NAS Management View) that will be integrated in the next version of Enterprise Manager to get a single pane of glass management interface.
The architecture
As you probably know, Compellent offers awesome software features on standard hardware, and this new product has the same approach:
- Based on ZFS filesystem;
- NFS/CIFS/WebDAV/FTP/RSYNC protocols support;
- GUI and CLI interfaces for management;
- Integrated and transparent to all Compellent features (Data Progression, Fast Track, Replicas);
- Snapshots for shared volumes;
- Space saving features: file compression now and deduplication soon;
- High performance controllers (2 quad core CPUs and 48GB of RAM per node);
- High bandwidth (up to 12 active ethernet ports on FE, 4 FC 8gb/sec on BE);
- High availability (two node clusters);
- Optional WORM capabilities;
The nodes don’t use boot disks, they boot directly from a Compellent volume.
Our installation
An highly availabele cluster comprised by two heads equipped with 24GB of RAM each on top of a SAN configured with 2 Series 30 controllers, 3 146GB SSDs, 13 300GB/15K RPM FCs and 16 2TB SATA disks.
@fabiorapposelli and @ionocatabi will install the NAS next week and they will perform some tests before going production.
stay tuned!