Everpure FlashBlade//EXA Hands-On Lab

Everpure FlashBlade//EXA is a scale-out, all-flash unstructured-data platform designed for AI training, HPC, and large-scale analytics workloads. It uses a disaggregated architecture in which Data Nodes handle high-throughput data movement while metadata services operate independently to scale linearly.

This Foundations lab provides hands-on access to a live FlashBlade//EXA system. Across seven guided activities you will explore dashboard navigation, file systems and exports, NFS policies, performance and capacity analysis, system health, and array-wide settings, and then complete an end-to-end provisioning workflow that creates a new file system, attaches an NFS export policy, and mounts it from a Linux client.

By the end of this lab you will be able to:

• Navigate the Purity//FB dashboard and interpret the Capacity, Performance, Recent Alerts, and Hardware Health panels
• Inspect file systems, exports, and individual file system properties
• Review NFS export policies and their rule structure
• Read performance and capacity charts at the array, file system, and Data Node levels
• Use the Health view to inspect hardware components and identify alerts
• Provision an end-to-end NFS workflow by creating a Data Node Group, defining an NFS export policy, creating a file system, and mounting it from a Linux client

• Everpure FlashBlade//EXA 8-Node System (storage)
• Dell PowerEdge R760 with Intel Xeon Platinum 8592 processor, 128 cores (Linux client / compute)
• NVIDIA Spectrum SN5600, 800 Gbps switch (storage network connectivity)
• Windows 11 virtual machine (jump host into the lab environment)