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Dell's scaly-headed file system gets bigger and bitier

Pet dragon Fluid File System grows teeth for RAM-enhanced version 4

Dell's scale-out NAS Fluid File System filer head software has had a major upgrade for v4.0, with more controller RAM and support for larger files in a bigger namespace.

FluidFS comes with the FS8600 appliance which can scale out to four nodes. It is pitched against industry-leader Isilon, with Dell saying: "The new version of FluidFS can deliver better performance at a lower price." It's got an SPC-1 benchmark boost – which we mentioned last week – to prove it.

The Isilon filer scales out to 50 nodes or more and has a 50PB namespace limit. In the file storage Game of Thrones it's intended for much larger workloads than Dell's FluidFS, being a Big Data-munching killer dragon. Dell's scaly filer is more of a pet dragon, an everyday scale-out filer, so to speak.

Dell says that as an FS8600 cluster grows from one to four nodes, performance improves linearly up to 494,000 max SPECsfs file OPS and 11.9 GB/sec throughput. We wrote that "in the 80,000–130,000 SPC-1 IOPS area Dell’s SC4020 is the best price/performer in our SPC-1 records".

Specification-wise v4 FluidFS has:

  • Doubled controller RAM at 48GB
  • Files can grow to 16TB
  • Doubled single-file namespace of 4PB
  • Support for SMB 3, NFS 4 and 4.1
  • IPv6 networking support
  • Directory quotas
  • SACL-based auditing
  • File filtering
  • Better data protection with replication and NDMP
  • Improved VMware integration

For Compellent and EqualLogic array customers or for people needing scale-out filer performance in the sub-500,000 SPC-1 IOPS area, the FS8600/FluidFS combo looks attractive.

Fluid FS v4 is available now on the Compellent (SC) array, with the FS8600 appliance and will arrive on the EqualLogic (PS) platform later this year. ®

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