Expanded GPU options to CloudIQ support PowerFlex 3.6 has it all and much more
- Alankar Joshi
- Jul 19, 2021
- 5 min read
PowerFlex allows Enterprise Customers to harness the power of software (break through traditional bottlenecks and restrictions and focused on performance, scale and fluidity), embrace change (flexible deployment architectures, broad platform support, consumption options) while achieving consistently predictable outcomes (consistent across transactional and throughput intensive workloads) for mission-critical workloads.
PowerFlex offers a strong toolset for simplifying IT operations for the infrastructure with PowerFlex Manager, which automates complex life cycle management and IT operations tasks, boosting IT productivity and infrastructure predictability. PowerFlex Manager also offers standards-based open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and custom Ansible modules, making it simple to integrate with third party tools and custom workflows. Further, with CloudIQ, PowerFlex uses an Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning-based approach to infrastructure monitoring and management, ensuring simplicity and consistency at scale.
CloudIQ with PowerFlex
CloudIQ is important as it reduces risk with proactive health notifications and predictive analytics that pinpoint deviations and performance impacts to speed troubleshooting and resolution, plan ahead to meet enterprise business needs with capacity full projections and anomaly detection, improve the productivity of staff and collaborate better with a single view of customer IT environment, custom reports, and third-party software integrations. CloudIQ is the latest addition with the release of PowerFlex 3.6 (As CloudIQ does not support a PowerFlex 3.6 Gateway with older versions of PowerFlex software components, for having a CloudIQ support, the PowerFlex operating system must be 3.6 or later).
Key CloudIQ Advantages
Intelligent Infrastructure Insights
System Health Scores
Intelligent Capacity Prediction
Intelligent Performance Tracking
End to End Data Path Analysis
Please find the whitepaper below covering all the details
CloudIQ proactive monitoring and performance analytics for PowerFlex software-defined infrastructure
PowerFlex 3.6 also brings, Expanded GPU support for NVIDIA
NVIDIA VS100
V100S is the flagship product of Tesla data center computing platform for deep learning, HPC, and graphics, available everywhere from desktops to servers to cloud services, delivering both dramatic performance gains and cost savings opportunities.
NVIDIA T4
T4 accelerates diverse cloud workloads, including HPC, deep learning training and inference, machine learning, data analytics, and graphics. It is based on NVIDIA Turing architecture, T4 is optimized for mainstream computing environments and features multi-precision Turing Tensor Cores and new RT Cores.
NVIDIA RTX 6000
RTX6000 is powered by the NVIDIA Turing architecture and the NVIDIA RTX platform, which brings the most important advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional workflows.
NVIDIA RTX 8000
RTX8000 provides professional graphics with unprecedented performance and scalability with 48 GB of high-speed GDDR6 memory and NVIDIA NVLink
NVIDIA A40
NVIDIA A40 offers performance and multi-workload capabilities, combining best-in-class professional graphics with powerful compute and AI acceleration to meet today’s design, creative, and scientific challenges.
NVIDIA A100
It delivers extraordinary acceleration at every scale for AI, data analytics, and high-performance computing to tackle the world’s toughest computing challenges. A100 can efficiently scale to thousands of GPUs or, with NVIDIA Multi-Instance GPU technology, be partitioned into seven GPU instances to accelerate workloads of all sizes.
Network resiliency improvement features in PowerFlex 3.6
PowerFlex Resilience (Network Path Disqualification)
Network Resilience Improvements are extremely important in Enterprise Customer Environment. If a port or socket is experiencing frequent disconnects (flapping), it can cause system performance issues in a fully distributed architecture. This port flap issue will cause performance degradation. PowerFlex 3.6 detects these frequent disconnects and proactively disqualifies the path, preventing general disruption across the system. After the port is disqualified, the I/O in the system resumes as normal. Looking at the performance impact we see a significant improvement with PowerFlex 3.6 Port Flapping being Enabled.
Please find the below link for the overview with a demonstration
PowerFlex Resilience (SDS Proxy)
In PowerFlex 3.6, if a network path to one SDS fails, the SDC will retry I/Os (after a 10s cool-off period) using another SDS in the Protection Domain as a proxy for the requests.
Please find the below link for the overview with a demonstration
Some of the major new features introduced in PowerFlex 3.6
CloudIQ integration
Replication enhancements
Native asynchronous replication for hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) configurations
Supported only with systems managed by PowerFlex Manager
PowerFlex Native Asynchronous Replication on VMware HCI systems requires PowerFlex Manager 3.7 or later.
For systems not managed by PowerFlex Manager, replication can be configured only using non-VMware HCI nodes.
RPO as low as 15 seconds
Improved Replication Consistency Group (RCG) control with new RCG states
Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM)
Network resiliency improvements
SDS proxy access
Proactive network path error detection
PowerFlex GUI enhancements
Higher SDC count (support for up to 2048 SDCs per system)
API reference documentation on the Dell Technologies Developer Portal
Hardware awareness improvements for PowerEdge nodes
RHEL CoreOS and Fedora CoreOS, SDC support through Kuberenetes CSI plug-in
vSphere 7 Update 2 support (requires manual upgrade of vCenter)
Please see these new features in the link below
All the new features in PowerFlex 3.6 are focused on improving the Enterprise Customer Environment such as enhancing infrastructure monitoring and management support via Cloud IQ, expanded data center GPU support, Major Network Resilience Improvements and many other features. PowerFlex allows organizations to move faster and respond effectively to rapidly changing business needs.
Please Read my previous blogs on PowerFlex in the links below
To know more about PowerFlex, please go through my LinkedIn Posts mentioned below
The Dell PowerFlex family, powered by Intel Xeon processors, is software-defined storage that combines hardware and software to serve high-availability, data-reliant applications through scalability, flexibility, elasticity, and simplicity with predictability at scale Link
PowerFlex Manager provides valuable savings with both deployment and ongoing tasks—savings which accelerate as the PowerFlex platform scales. The automation provided by PowerFlex Manager substantially reduces the impact of human errors in large and complex environments. Link
Do you know the PowerFlex family is one of the best platforms to host the OpenShift cluster along with the MongoDB database? Link
PowerFlex is validated and optimized for a broad set of enterprise workloads including Oracle database, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP HANA, SAS, Splunk, Elastic Stack, Epic, and the list goes on...Link
Top Reasons to Optimize Next-Gen analytics applications with PowerFlex…Link
The PowerFlex software-defined storage platform demonstrated high performance, resilience, and scalability well beyond the expectations of any traditional architecture Link
To help ensure an organization’s success on the digital transformation journey, IT needs a highly scalable infrastructure and service automation. We showed that Docker containers, Kubernetes, and the CSI plug-in for PowerFlex systems, in combination, enable fast and easy provisioning of the Big Data Cluster services Link
PowerFlex is Validated and Optimized for Enterprise Workloads Link
Do you know about A Powerful Data Security Combination (PowerFlex and CloudLink)? Link
Dell EMC PowerFlex-Flexibility Unleashed Link
Over the past several years, Dell Digital, Dell’s IT organization, has been transforming its traditional data center into a flexible, agile multi-cloud environment built on Dell Technologies' infrastructure Link
PowerFlex helps to Protect Customer Enterprise Data during a natural disaster and other outages Link
Do you know for customers looking to build a hybrid cloud platform, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16.1 and Dell EMC PowerFlex Family offer a Great Solution? Link
PowerFlex offers great platform for Kubernetes stateful applications Link
Do you know about the deployment of a SUSE Rancher Kubernetes Cluster onto the Dell EMC PowerFlex family and the integration of PowerFlex CSI driver 1.4? Link
Network Resilience Improvements are extremely important in Enterprise Customer Environment. PowerFlex 3.6 detects these frequent disconnects and proactively disqualifies the path, preventing general disruption across the system. Link
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