Abstract from the Dell white paper:
This white paper provides an introduction to the Isilon SmartFlash, the foundation of the Isilon flash-based caching performance feature. The paper includes an overview of the OneFS caching architecture and describes the benefits of a SSD-based caching solution.
Blog posting from Risa Galant
New Features and enhancements in OneFS 8.0.1The following are just some of the new features included in OneFS 8.0.1. For details and the complete list of new features and enhancements, see the OneFS 8.0.1 Release Notes. You’ll need to log in to EMC Online Support to access release notes.Security enhancementsCloudPools proxy support means that you can configure CloudPools to route data coming from or going to a public cloud provider through a proxy server. CloudPools works with proxy servers running the SOCKS v4, SOCKS v5, or HTTP protocol. Note that SOCKS v4 does not support authentication.SyncIQ now supports failover and failback of SmartLock compliance mode domains containing protected WORM (write-once-read-many) files. After successful replication and failover, you can continue to work in SmartLock compliance mode domains on the target cluster, adding new files and committing them to a WORM state. When failing back to the original cluster, SyncIQ ensures that WORM files are appropriately replicated back to the SmartLock compliance mode domain.Several new CLI commands were added to support using Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates to enhance communication security over a network.
There have been a couple of recent questions from the field regarding quota performance. So it seemed like an ideal opportunity for a blog post on one of the more obscure tuning parameters of Isilon SmartQuotas.
Within OneFS, quota data is maintained in Quota Accounting Blocks (QABs). Each QAB contains a large number of Quota Accounting records, which need to be updated whenever a particular user adds or removes data from an area of the filesystem on which quotas are enabled (quota domain). If a large quantity of clients are simultaneously accessing the quota domain, these blocks can become highly contended and a potential bottleneck. Similarly, if a single client (or small number of clients) consistently makes a large number of small writes to files within a single quota, write performance could again be impacted.
To address this, as of OneFS 7.2.1.1 and later, quota accounts have a mechanism to help avoid hot spots on the nodes storing QABs. Quota Account Constituents (QACs) help parallelize the quota accounting by including additional QAB mirrors distributed across other nodes in the cluster.
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