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 PowerScale OneFS is the operating system that powers the world’s most flexible 1,
cluster and up to 186 PB raw efficient2 and secure3 scale-out NAS solution. A foundation of a scalable, high-
capacity in a single namespace performance, modular storage architecture, OneFS enables you to store, manage,
• Automated policy-driven tiered protect, secure, and analyze your data while running a wide variety of file workloads.
storage to optimize resources With built-in interoperability, PowerScale OneFS nodes are simple to manage at any
scale and capacity can easily be provisioned in minutes to a cluster. A single volume,
• Seamless public cloud
integration with a software- single filesystem, single namespace enables you to consolidate your data and
defined offer eliminate storage silos. Regardless of the number of nodes in your cluster, PowerScale
OneFS allows you to store and manage many petabytes of data with a single admin.
• Resilient data protection for a With support for protocols like NFS, SMB, S3 and HDFS, you can simultaneously run
highly available environment applications that require file and object protocols in the same namespace. With the
• Comprehensive security and flexibility of the OneFS software, it can be deployed at the edge, core, or the cloud, and is
compliance options available as an appliance, as-a-service, or as a customer-managed software-defined
• Optimized storage offer in the public cloud with Dell APEX File Storage for AWS.
consumption with flexible
quotas
OneFS software features
• Seamless load balancing of OneFS provides software modules that simplify storage and data management at
client connections for scale. Storage management features and functionality like auto-balance, snapshots,
maximum availability data protection, backup, replication, and disaster recovery help to simplify and automate
• Storage efficiency, management for OneFS powered clusters. Data management capabilities like quotas
deduplication and compression and deduplication enable administrators and data owners to maximize investments
to reduce costs from the data. Storage management features like remote monitoring lower costs and
reduces risk.
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 across
PowerScale platforms, and certifications including Common Criteria and
DISA Approved Product List. OneFS security was further reinforced with
features like multi-factor authentication with support for CAC/PIV,
software-based firewall functionality, SSO for administrative WebUI, FIPS-
compliant data in flight in the latest software release. Additional cyber-
resiliency tools are available for data isolation, automated threat
detection and rapid recovery in PowerScale Cyber Protection Solution.
1
2
Based on internal analysis of publicly available information sources, August 2021.
Based Based on Dell analysis comparing efficiency-related features: data reduction, storage capacity, data protection, hardware, space, lifecycle management efficiency, and ENERY STAR certified configurations, June 2023.
3
Based on Dell analysis comparing cyber-security software capabilities offered for Dell PowerScale vs. competitive products, September 2022.
Dell PowerScale OneFS Software Features
© 2023 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. Reference Number: h18275
PowerScale SmartPools
OneFS comprises a single file system single namespace that spans all the
nodes of a cluster. SmartPools allow 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 tier the files to the appropriate location based on your
requirements. Capacity and performance-based data placement provide 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.
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 contains the maps to the contents in the cloud. Users access the data the same
way as before without changes to policies and procedures – you do not 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.
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 allows 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
Dell PowerScale OneFS Software Features
© 2023 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. Reference Number: h18275
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.
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
Dell PowerScale OneFS Software Features
© 2023 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. Reference Number: h18275
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.
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.
Dell PowerScale OneFS Software Features
© 2023 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. Reference Number: h18275
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.
InsightIQ
Streamline unstructured data performance management and
unlock application benefits with Dell's InsightIQ software for
PowerScale storage. InsightIQ is Dell’s software specifically
designed to monitor and manage performance for PowerScale
storage. Dell’s software enables you to run demanding AI
workloads by keeping systems operating at peak levels. The
performance monitoring software offers modernized infrastructure
for expanded scale, simplified experience with a new user
interface, and automated operations to streamline management.
InsightIQ: PowerScale Performance Management Software
SmartQoS
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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