ME4084 comparing to Scv3000 and existing Scv2080

Question

Hello everyone,

I am looking between two choices here if I am to purchase a new storage, Scv3000 (plus an expansion) and ME4084.

Our main application is scientific computing with steady writing and occasional yet large amount of reading.

Current Scv2080 seems to get the job done without much incident. It looks pretty apparent that ME4 has lower specs comparing to Scv3000 but I wonder if there is any perceivable difference if we populate both of them with all NL-SAS disks as we did on Scv2080.

Thanks!

DELL-Sam L · Accepted Answer

Hello Wade,

With the ME4 it is designed to run multiple pools. With your setup of 84x12tb drives it you would max out your pool size. If you need to add any more drives other than the 84 you would need to create a second pool. With the ME4 you can set it up as either Virtual storage or Linear Storage. There are major differences between the 2 modes, & you can read about that in the administrator guide.

We don’t recommend using software raid on top of hardware raid. There is not a way to do create a single mount point natively on an ME4.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

DELL-Sam L · Answer

Hello 5X5CX62,

If you are going to use NL-SAS drives there won’t be much difference between the systems. The differences are in the way you are going to configure your Raid type and volumes/ virtual disk. Compellent systems handle the volumes differently than an ME4084. Here is the link to the administrator guide for an ME4084 which explains a little more about the differences in the way you can setup an ME4084. https://topics-cdn.dell.com/pdf/powervault-me4012_administrator-guide_en-us.pdf

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

5X5CX62 · Answer

Hi Sam,

Thanks for your answer. I did take a quick look at the guide and have a few additional questions for ME4 system.

1. What kind of impact does overcommit have on performance or anything else? The guide states that max usable pool size is 512/1024 TiB respectively with or without CLI on. Our plan is to ultimately fill the ME4084 (if we do choose it over Scv3000 for the 5U 84 bay configuration) with 12T*84 NL-SAS.

2. It looks like the max size of a volume is 128(140) TB. Due to the nature of our work, we prefer a single mount point in the system. Is it advisable to use LVM on system level to create a single mount point using multiple volumes? Or is there any "storage native" way to achive this?

Best regards,

Wade

PowerVault

ME4084 comparing to Scv3000 and existing Scv2080

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