Nodes are the individual hardware components that are grouped into a cluster to be accessed as block storage. There are two types of nodes in a SolidFire storage system: storage nodes and Fibre Channel nodes.
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Storage nodes
A SolidFire storage node is a server containing a collection of drives that communicate with each other through the Bond10G network interface. Drives in the node contain block and metadata space for data storage and data management.
Fibre Channel nodes
SolidFire Fibre Channel nodes provide connectivity to a Fibre Channel switch, which you can connect to Fibre Channel clients. Fibre Channel nodes act as a protocol converter between the Fibre Channel and iSCSI protocols; this enables you to add Fibre Channel connectivity to any new or existing SolidFire cluster.
Drives
A storage node contains one or more physical drives that are used to store a portion of the data for the cluster. The cluster utilizes the capacity and performance of the drive after the drive has been successfully added to a cluster.