NativeSAN Design - Feedback

vikeswin1 · Wed Jul 10, 2013 8:00 pm

I'm in the process of building a new NativeSAN for a client.

I have all the specs but wanted to try some "NEW" design options.

1. Using Dell PERC 710p "Cachecade" SSD to improve HDD performace?

http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/pr ... -sheet.pdf

2. Can I use multiple 10gig links, for Sync Channel?

3. Limitions customer will only allow 2 Nodes for now, and Dell SSD are limited.

SSD Drives budget will permit: 100GB Solid State Drive SATA Value MLC 3Gbps 2.5in Hot-plug Drive

Will give boost to 600GB 10K SAS drives running RAID 10.

Thoughts?

Wed Jul 10, 2013 8:27 pm

1) Yes, before V8 will be out with a flash caching (and Windows Server 2012 R2 with an automatic storage tiering) that would make sense.

2) Yes, just don't trunk them. StarWind will do it on it's own creating a fat pipe from a smaller ones.

3) Should be fine. Flash-friendly V8 is coming, V6 is still OK.

jeddyatcc · Thu Jul 11, 2013 2:43 pm

DELL lowers the warranty on their SSD's so be careful there. Also, 3gbps SSD isn't worth the money most days unless you are doing complete random, using it for caching may actually slow things down depending on the type of cache used. I have found the DELL RAID controllers to be awesome for Write-Back cache without SSD. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe that reading from 10k rpm drives in a RAID 5 or RAID 6 will actually be faster than a 3gbps SSD...

Thu Jul 11, 2013 3:43 pm

With upcoming V8 and LSFS that's not going to be a problem. We'll be very very very friendly to flash.

Flash is about read IOPS and not bandwidth. LSFS will turn small and random writes to sequential writes to for write-intensive you could be use anything
including SATA spindle. So 20K 4K IOPS from a single SATA drive would not be a problem

Reads are another story and that's where flash shines.

jeddyatcc wrote:DELL lowers the warranty on their SSD's so be careful there. Also, 3gbps SSD isn't worth the money most days unless you are doing complete random, using it for caching may actually slow things down depending on the type of cache used. I have found the DELL RAID controllers to be awesome for Write-Back cache without SSD. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe that reading from 10k rpm drives in a RAID 5 or RAID 6 will actually be faster than a 3gbps SSD...