ACCESS APPLIANCE

The Veritas Access Appliance is a turn-key storage platform designed for cost optimization and high capacity, making it well suited for long-term retention of FlashArray volume snapshots. Key features of the Access Appliance include:

• Disk-based solution
• Integrated high availability – 2 nodes configured as active/active cluster, hot spares, and redundant power modules, RAID controllers, disk power paths, and disk SAS signals.
• Multi-protocol support – NFS, CIFS/SMB, FTP and S3.
• Scales up to 2.8 PB (2.5 PiB) of usable storage capacity
• Veritas AutoSupport to provide proactive monitoring and alerting 24x7 on the health of the appliance to reduce risk and quicker resolution.
• Symantec Data Center Security (SDCS) intrusion detection system. SDCS is a real-time monitoring and auditing software. It performs host intrusion detection, file integrity monitoring, configuration monitoring, user access tracking and monitoring, and produces logs and event reports. For more information on the Access Appliance intrusion detection system, refer to the Access Appliance Initial Configuration and Administration Guide.
• Encryption with an external Key Management System (KMS) to create the keys for encryption.
• Replication of data on an Access Appliance to another offsite Access Appliance for disaster recovery purposes.

The Access Appliance model 3340 is comprised of two clustered nodes and one primary storage shelf and up to three additional expansion storage shelves. The appliance can scale up to 2,800 TB of usable space as can be seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2 - Access Appliance Rack Units

The two nodes are clustered in active/active configuration such that each node can handle I/O requests. Storage shelves are connected to each node and configured with dynamic multipathing, so I/O can be sent to either node for performance and availability. There are four 10 GbE uplinks (2 per node) available for client connections. Figure 3 provides a view of these connections with 2 shelves.

Figure 3 - Access Appliance Connections Example

The redundant hardware RAID controller in the primary storage shelf configures and presents the shelves’ physical disks into disk groups (volumes) protected by a RAID 6 storage layout. With a RAID 6 configuration, data with dual parity is striped across the configured volumes. There are 5 volumes per storage shelf with each volume containing 16 disks as pictured in Figure 4. Each data volume can remain operational despite two concurrent disk failures.

Figure 4 – Access Appliance Storage Shelves Disk Layout

The nodes run RHEL 7.4 or later as the operating system platform and Access software version 7.3.2 or later. The Access Appliance supports multiple protocols, including NFS, CIFS/SMB, FTP, and S3. With FlashArray, the Access Appliance is seen as an NFS target.

When using Access as an NFS target, a “cluster file system” type is created where shares on that file system can be exported and then mounted on the FlashArray. The shares should be exported at the minimum with “rw” and sync option set on Access. Prior to configuring the share as a target in FlashArray, permissions of the FlashArray user which has a user id and group id of 1000 would need to be set appropriately for the share exported.

For management, the appliance can be managed by the command-line shell referred to as the CLISH and/or a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) where one can provision storage pools, create file systems and provision Access as an S3, NFS, and/or SMB targets.