Data Sheet
Dell PowerScale OneFS Software Features
Simplify storage and data management for unstructured data
ESSENTIALS The power of the OneFS operating system
• Scales up to 252 nodes in a cluster PowerScale OneFS is the operating system that powers the world’s most flexible1
and up to 186 PB raw capacity in a and secure2 scale-out NAS solution. A foundation of a scalable, high-performance,
modular storage architecture, OneFS enables you to store, manage, protect,
single namespace secure, and analyze your data while running a wide variety of data-centric file
• Automated policy-driven tiered workloads. With built-in interoperability, PowerScale OneFS nodes are simple to
manage at any scale and capacity can easily be provisioned in minutes to a
storage to optimize resources
cluster. A single volume, single filesystem, single namespace enables you to
• Seamless public cloud integration to consolidate your data and eliminate storage silos. Regardless of the number of
lower costs nodes in your cluster, PowerScale OneFS allows you to store and manage many
petabytes of data with a single admin. With support for protocols like NFS, SMB,
• Resilient data protection for a highly S3 and HDFS, you can simultaneously run applications that require file and object
available environment protocols on the same dataset to help maximize the value of your data.
• 1 Based on internal analysis of publicly available information sources, August 2021. CLM-0013892
Comprehensive security and
compliance options 2Based on Dell analysis comparing cyber-security software capabilities offered for Dell PowerScale vs. competitive products,
September 2022.
• Optimized storage consumption with
flexible quotas
OneFS software features
• Seamless load balancing of client
connections for maximum availability OneFS provides software modules that simplify storage and data management at
scale. Storage management features and functionality like autobalance,
• Storage efficiency, deduplication and snapshots, data protection, backup, replication, and disaster recovery help to
compression to reduce costs simplify and automate management for OneFS powered clusters. Data
management capabilities like quotas and deduplication enable administrators and
• ‘Service Gateway’ storage data owners to maximize investments from the data. Storage management
management and monitoring lowers features like remote monitoring lowers cost and reduces risk.
operational costs
PowerScale OneFS built-in security features
The PowerScale OneFS operating system comes with a
comprehensive set of built-in security features including
customizable role-based access control, access zones for data
segregation, data at rest and data in flight encryption, virus
scanning tool, WORM SmartLock compliance, multi-protocol
ACLs for cross protocol security and auditing, external key
manager for data at rest encryption, STIG-hardened security
profile, Common Criteria certification, support for UEFI Secure
Boot across PowerScale platforms.
Additional cyber-resiliency tools are available for data
isolation, automated threat detection and rapid
recovery in PowerScale Cyber Protection Solution.
Dell PowerScale OneFS Software Features
© 2023 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries.
PowerScale SmartPools
OneFS comprises a single file system single namespace that
spans all the nodes of a cluster. SmartPools allows multiple
storage tiers to exist within a single file system to aggregate
and consolidate applications within a single storage pool. This
gives you workflow isolation, higher utilization, and
independent scalability – from a single point of management.
SmartPools allows you to define the value of the data within
your workflows based on policies and automatically aligns the
data to the appropriate price/performance tier over time.
Utilizing file-level granularity and control with automatic
policies, you can tune performance and data layout, storage
tier alignment and protection settings – all without impact to
your end-users. SmartPools allows for unprecedented
flexibility, granularity, and ease of management. SmartPools
aligns the business value of data with optimal storage
performance and cost by optimized data placement including
flash, hybrid, archive and cloud storage. Policy triggers that
determine optimized data placement include criteria like file
age, size, type, owner, location, or date fields. By default, the
SmartPools jobs run nightly to apply new policies to the selected data and seamlessly tiers the files to the appropriate location
based on your requirements. Capacity and performance-based data placement provides even further granularity while improving
storage efficiency.
PowerScale CloudPools
CloudPools software provides policy-based automated tiering
that lets you seamlessly integrate with the cloud as an
additional storage tier for the cluster. This allows you to
address rapid data growth, reduce storage costs and optimize
data center storage resources by using the cloud for frozen
data. In this way, your more valuable storage may be used for
more active data and applications, while frozen data may be
retained at minimum cost for compliance, historical or other
business reasons.
With CloudPools, you have a flexible choice of tiering data to
public, private or hybrid cloud options. You can select from
Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3, Google Cloud Platform
(GCP), Alibaba Aliyun, Federal C2S clouds, Microsoft Azure
or ECS.
CloudPools is simple to setup, deploy and manage because it uses the same flexible and powerful policy engine that PowerScale
SmartPools uses. You can use SmartPools and CloudPools together to optimally place data within your cluster or the cloud. For
example, SmartPools may be used to tier "warm" data to an archive tier in your cluster while CloudPools may be used to tier “frozen”
data to the cloud. The use of CloudPools is transparent to end users and applications.
With CloudPools and SmartPools, you may define policies that identify the data to be tiered, the criteria for tiering and the choice of
the public or private cloud target. The policies are dynamic, flexible, and scalable which provides you with granular control of the
data placement. A policy can be based on any combination of file metadata attributes such as timestamps, file name or type or file
size.
When a file is tiered, it is replaced by a SmartLink that contain the maps to the contents in the cloud. Users access the data the
same way as before without changes to policies and procedures – you don’t have to do anything different to access the data. If you
access a tiered file, only the relevant blocks are retrieved without the need to retrieve the entire file from the cloud. When you modify
a tiered file, only the relevant portions of the file are rewritten to the cloud, thereby optimizing the bandwidth. CloudPools allows you
to encrypt or compress data that is transmitted.
2 | Dell PowerScale OneFS Software Modules
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PowerScale SmartQuotas
SmartQuotas allow you to control and limit storage
usage by assigning quotas at the cluster, directory,
subdirectory, user and group levels. SmartQuotas
span across the entire cluster thus enabling you to
easily administer storage from a single interface.
With its thin provisioning capability, SmartQuotas
allow you to present more storage capacity to
applications and users than is physically installed. In
this way, you can limit their actual physical storage
resources to what is only needed today and
automatically add storage resources on demand to
meet changing business requirements in the future.
Storage capacity can be automatically increased
with minimal administrative overhead, so that you
can purchase less storage capacity up front, defer
capacity upgrades to match actual business usage
and save on power and cooling costs associated
with keeping unused disk capacity spinning.
When actual capacity begins to approach its designated threshold, nodes can be added to the cluster quickly and easily – typically
in minutes. The result is unprecedented grow-as-you-go flexibility and value if you are looking to minimize costs while keeping pace
with data growth.
SmartQuotas can be used to establish hard, soft and advisory storage capacity limits that can be set across your organization for
specific users and groups, as well as across the various directory structures. Setting up advisory and soft quotas as a percentage of
the hard quota provides improved convenience, flexibility and usability. You can also use SmartQuotas to configure alerts and send
email notifications to end users, letting them know that quota limits are approaching, enforcing hard stops on writes, or providing a
grace period of several days before maintaining thresholds.
PowerScale SmartConnect
SmartConnect delivers intelligent, automatic
client connection load balancing and failover
capabilities to optimize storage performance and
data availability. Through a single host name,
SmartConnect enables client connection load
balancing and dynamic NFS protocol failover
and failback of client connections across nodes
to provide optimal utilization of the cluster.
Without the need to install client-side drivers,
you can easily manage several clients even in
the face of system failures. SmartConnect
balances client connections across nodes based
on policies that help ensure optimal usage of
your cluster resources. By leveraging your
existing network infrastructure, SmartConnect
provides a layer of intelligence that allows all
client and user resources to point to a single host name, enabling easy management of a large and growing numbers of clients.
Based on user configurable policies, SmartConnect applies intelligent algorithms (e.g., CPU utilization, aggregate throughput,
connection count, or round robin) and distributes clients across the cluster to optimize client performance and end-user experience.
SmartConnect uses a virtual IP failover scheme that does not require any client-side drivers. The cluster shares a “pool” of virtual
IPs that is distributed across all nodes of the cluster. The cluster distributes an IP address across NFS (Linux and UNIX) clients
based on the policy. If a node within a cluster is brought down for any reason including a failure, the cluster automatically distributes
the IPs of that node to the remaining nodes and the clients can keep using the same IP of the failed node. The virtual IPs on the
client connection will seamlessly failover to another node in the cluster. This ensures that when a node failure occurs, all in-flight
reads and writes are handed off to another node in the cluster to finish its operation without any user or application interruption.
3 | Dell PowerScale OneFS Software Modules
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PowerScale SnapshotIQ
SnapshotIQ software provides simple point-in-time data
protection and recovery by making frequent, user-
recoverable backups of files. SnapshotIQ backups data
automatically and as frequently as required to meet your
RPO regardless of the size of the file system or
directory.
SnapshotIQ also offers an extremely fast snapshot
capability – typically less than one second to create.
When needed, near-immediate data restoration is
available to easily meet your RTO. Snapshots can be
taken at a granular level, and you can take up to 1024
snapshots per directory. Because SnapshotIQ is
globally coherent and spans across all nodes regardless
of the cluster size, you can administer snapshots from a
single point of view. With SnapshotIQ, you no longer
need to worry about managing snapshot capacity and
performance. With the flexibility of your cluster, storage
capacity and performance can be added on-the-fly,
quickly and transparently, without having to replicate or
delete snapshots. Since snapshots are an integral part of the OneFS file system there is no need to pre-allocate dedicated snapshot
reserve space. Once your baseline snapshot has been established, only changes to blocks that make up a file are reflected in
updates to the current version of snapshots.
The automated SnapRevert functionality of SnapshotIQ also makes restoration to a specific recovery point extremely easy. One of
the largest IT costs associated with backup and restore is the sheer number of help desk calls from end-users who accidentally
delete a file or directory. To reduce these costs, SnapshotIQ can be used to empower end-users by enabling them to easily find and
restore their own accidentally deleted files or folders – without any IT intervention.
PowerScale SmartDedupe
SmartDedupe maximizes the storage efficiency of a
cluster by decreasing the amount of physical storage by
scanning the on-disk data for identical blocks and then
eliminating the duplicates. This approach is commonly
referred to as post-process or asynchronous
deduplication. After duplicate blocks are discovered,
SmartDedupe moves a single copy of those blocks to a
special set of files known as shadow stores. During this
process, duplicate blocks are removed from the actual
files and replaced with pointers to the shadow stores.
With post-process deduplication, new data is first stored
on the storage device and then a subsequent process
analyzes the data looking for commonality. This means
that the initial file-write or modify performance is not
impacted since no additional computation is required in
the write path. The process of sampling, fingerprinting,
and matching the data is used to create an index that
helps with the matching of duplicate blocks.
SmartDedupe can be configured all the way from a volume to a directory level granularity. You can schedule when and how
frequently the SmartDedupe job runs. You can monitor and report on the status and progress of the SmartDedupe job. An
assessment job can be run in estimation mode to predict the potential space savings of the dedupe process. The efficiency is
dependent on the type of data scanned and the potential compressibility of that data. Various PowerScale and Isilon nodes provide
the capability of inline compression and deduplication.
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PowerScale SmartLock
Protecting critical data from alteration is a key business
imperative for most organizations. SmartLock helps you
protect your critical data against accidental, premature or
malicious alteration or deletion. Because SmartLock is a
software-based approach to Write Once Read Many
(WORM), you can store SmartLock-protected data
alongside other data types in your cluster with no effect
on performance or availability and without the added cost
of purchasing and maintaining specialty WORM-capable
hardware.
SmartLock operates in either one of two modes – in an
Enterprise mode or in a Compliance mode. You must
choose the desired mode of operation during the initial
cluster configuration. In Compliance mode, login by the
root user is disabled, providing the extra level of
protection to meet regulatory requirements. With
Compliance mode, SmartLock can help you to meet
regulatory compliance requirements to provide absolute
retention and protection of data – including the most
stringent SEC 17a-4 requirements. Data protected with
SmartLock cannot be altered by anyone. In Enterprise
mode, this data can be deleted by an authorized administrator. Retention times set under SmartLock are absolute, elapsed time and
thereby preclude the impact of potential time zones changes, leap years or other time and calendar-related events which might
occur during the retention period.
With SmartLock, you can protect your data at the directory-level and thereby eliminate the wasted space and complexity of
managing WORM protections across multiple devices or volumes. You can set customized retention times for specific files.
SmartLock is tightly integrated with OneFS and provides efficient storage for your WORM data.
PowerScale SyncIQ
SyncIQ offers powerful, flexible, and easy to manage the
secure replication of data for disaster recovery, business
continuance, disk-to-disk backup and remote disk archive.
SyncIQ delivers replication performance because every
node can send and receive data. Replication gets faster the
larger your data store grows since SyncIQ can take
advantage of any available network bandwidth. By default,
replication between nodes is encrypted.
A simple and intuitive web-based UI allows you to easily
organize SyncIQ replication job rates and priorities to match
business continuance priorities. You can configure a
directory, file system or even specific files for replication
based on the business criticality. You can also create
remote archive copies of data that needs to be retained so
you can reclaim valuable capacity in your production
system. SyncIQ can support end-to-end encryption of data
along with seamless integration with Dell PowerScale
Cybersecurity Solution powered by Superna.
Performance of SyncIQ include incremental transfer where only changed blocks are replicated, snapshot integration, bandwidth
metering, monitoring, throttling and flexible scheduling. For availability, SyncIQ jobs can be configured for alerting and logging along
with failure and recovery.
PowerScale SmartSync
PowerScale OneFS 9.4 introduced a new data movement and replication engine to move data quickly and efficiently between
systems. Designed from the ground up, SmartSync replication – like SyncIQ - moves or replicates file data between PowerScale
systems. SmartSync cloud copy is optimized to move data between file and object repositories like ECS, Microsoft Azure or Amazon
AWS. SmartSync can enable push or pull replication so that it can optimize the load on a system without over-burdening it. The
ability to embed this engine across platforms provide a flexible way to move data between disparate systems.
5 | Dell PowerScale OneFS Software Modules
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InsightIQ
InsightIQ simplifies data and storage management of PowerScale and Isilon systems. A single InsightIQ instance can manage, monitor,
analyze and report on groups of OneFS clusters, thus enabling centralized management of PowerScale. Capacity, performance
monitoring and trending are just some of the capabilities to lower the cost of management of PowerScale Introduced in OneFS 9.5,
SmartQoS provides the ability to control cluster performance and quality of service by allocating specific NFS3, NFS4, NFSoRDMA, S3
or SMB protocol operations per second (Protocol Ops), including mixed traffic to the same workload.
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