System Prerequisites & Hardware Sizing

Aarkam is architected for bare-metal, virtualized, and air-gapped high-assurance environments. To ensure maximum throughput for Cauchy Reed-Solomon erasure coding and unbuffered Direct I/O, physical infrastructure must meet the following baseline specifications.

1. Hardware Requirements Matrix

2. Memory Sizing Formula

Aarkam minimizes memory consumption through zero-allocation pooled spans and direct disk streaming. Sizing memory scales linearly with raw storage capacity:

\(\text{RAM (GB)} = 16\text{ GB (Base OS/Runtime)} + (1.2\text{ GB} \times \text{Usable Capacity in TB})\)

• 100 TB Usable Capacity: Requires approximately \(16 + 120 = 136\text{ GB}\) distributed across cluster nodes.
• 1 PB Usable Capacity: In an 8-node cluster, each node requires 128 GB to 256 GB ECC RAM.

3. Storage Media & Direct I/O Preparation

Kdouja operates through unbuffered Direct I/O (FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING on Windows, O_DIRECT on Linux), requiring raw block access without intermediate translation layers:

Linux Kernel Preparation

# Verify 4096-byte logical sector size on storage NVMe drives
sudo blockdev --getss /dev/nvme0n1
# Output must be 4096 or 512

# Format partitions with 4K block alignment
sudo mkfs.ext4 -b 4096 /dev/nvme0n1p1

# Kernel parameters in /etc/sysctl.d/99-aarkam.conf
fs.file-max = 2097152
fs.aio-max-nr = 1048576
vm.dirty_ratio = 10
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5
vm.swappiness = 1

4. Network Ports & Firewall Matrix

Every Aarkam host must have the required ports opened on the internal backplane network: