POWERSCALE SCALE-OUT NAS ADMINISTRATION

About the Course

This five-day technical deep dive provides the essential knowledge required to manage and maintain high-performance, scale-out NAS environments. As organizations grapple with the exponential growth of unstructured data, this course focuses on the architecture and management of the OneFS operating system. Participants will learn how to design and manage a storage environment that provides a single file system, a single volume, and enterprise-grade resiliency across a distributed cluster of nodes.

The curriculum covers the entire administrative lifecycle, from initial networking setup and identity management to advanced data services. Students will gain hands-on experience configuring industry-standard protocols such as SMB, NFS, and S3, while mastering core efficiency modules including tiering, snapshots, and replication. This course is the direct successor to the legacy Isilon administration training, updated to reflect the latest hardware and software advancements in the PowerScale ecosystem.

Audience Profile

This course is intended for:

• Storage Administrators responsible for daily cluster health and capacity management.

• Systems Engineers tasked with configuring client access and authentication.

• IT Professionals supporting large-scale media, life sciences, or big data analytics workloads.

• Technical Partners providing implementation and support services for scale-out NAS solutions.

Learning Objectives

Cluster Architecture and Networking

• Explain the PowerScale distributed architecture and the fundamental building blocks of a cluster.

• Configure complex networking environments using SmartConnect, subnets, and groupnets.

• Navigate the OneFS directory structure and utilize multiple management interfaces (WebUI and CLI).

Access Control and Identity Management

• Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to delegate administrative permissions.

• Configure authentication providers (Active Directory, LDAP) and manage multi-protocol identity mapping.

• Utilize Access Zones to provide secure, isolated environments for different business units.

Data Protection and Storage Efficiency

• Understand file striping, data layout, and OneFS protection levels (N+M).

• Implement storage tiering with SmartPools and cloud integration via CloudPools.

• Configure data services including SmartDedupe for capacity savings and SnapshotIQ for local recovery.

Data Mobility and Monitoring

• Orchestrate automated data replication using SyncIQ for disaster recovery.

• Monitor system performance and health using tools such as InsightIQ, DataIQ, and native CLI statistics.

• Manage storage quotas and file filtering to control cluster utilization.

Prerequisites

• Required: Completion of foundational “PowerScale Concepts” and “PowerScale Implementation” training.

• Technical: Proficiency in networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, and Routing).

• Experience: General familiarity with NAS (Network Attached Storage) and file-based protocols.