SSD for LSI Cachecade?

[Emulex]

Sandforce just blows with lsi controllers. WHT folks rock intel 320's at 20-40% (40-50% is ideal OP) all day long. Samsung 830's are hot too but you still have to OP or you may get some stutter.

LSI Nytro is essentially emlc/slc modules on a 2208 dual roc so you don't have to cable your ssd's. They are about $1500 including fastpath/cachecade. Pop that in and hook up your SFF-8087 and those M5110/M501x will import foreign and you will be blazing for hot-random i/o.

p.s. backplanes eat up a ton of iops. If you can direct fan-out you'll get at on of speed. I'm looking for a device that is 8x PCI-E that will give me 4 SATA power ports, and maybe a place to velcro/mount 4 ssd's for cachecade.

9260-8i + fastpath <=9265 without <=9271 without fyi

 

[aitor]

I am in similar situation - have LSI 928x controllers, considering adding CacheCade Pro.

I'm seriously considering Intel 313. It's only 20GB, but it's SLC, and designed as a cache drive, so should be durable. And it's cheap.

Comparison: I could buy one Hitachi SSD400S.B, which is an enterprise SLC drive with a SAS interface. At about £1100 for 100GB, this will do R57K/W25K random IOPS, or R536MB/sec / W502MB/sec sequential.

The Intel 313 costs £66. So for the same money, I could buy 16 of them and do a RAID 10 CacheCade.

It's only capable of R36K/W4K random, R220MB/sec / W115MB/sec seq. - but in a 16 drive RAID 10 it should be 4 to 8 times as fast. So, on paper, better performance than the Hitachi, more reliability via redundancy, and higher capacity (160GB). On the downside, that's a lot of drives to accommodate, and higher power consumption. It would also be difficult /expensive to get a 512GB CacheCade this way.

 

[beginner99]

What about the new intel s3700?

Rather cheap for enterprise product.

 

[aitor]

I hadn't seen the s3700. If it's really as cheap as $235 for 100GB, and endurance is really as good as they claim, then that looks like a fantastic contender.

CacheCade supports a max of 32 SSDs, IIRC, so to maximise IOPs it may still be more cost effective to go for many small drives. Hopefully the 512GB limit will go away at some point.

 

[Emulex]

cachecade read only + pro (r/w) require more bandwidth for the ssd serving the volume or it can limit throughput of say 8x15K SAS drives.

cachecade pro (r/w) requires raid-1 otherwise if you lose the cachecade volume, your raid will failz.

consumer drives may not do ecc like SAS [ssd/harddrive] - the device is not checking either. a cachecade with sata consumer ssd and sata nearline drives can push corrupted data through.

the 512gb limit is gone on their integrated products, iirc, they said up to 4TB. Nytro/Warp are all just lsi 2208/2308 with ssd and/or ports and fastpath/cachecade.


9265-8i without fastpath is faster than a 9260-8i with fastpath since the 9265 has dual-core powerpc and faster ram,etc .

DDR3 models and PCI-E 3.0 can actually do 6 drives raid-0 without choking the powerpc chip/pci bus.

then again you can get a M5014 for $66 , so one might afford having two or four of those for less money than a shiney new one

Cachecade makes sense if you are not willing to go all-out on SSD, but i'd stick to read-only with consumer drives.

 

[Gunbuster]

This thread is relevant to my interests. I'm thinking of trying Cachecade on my next VM host (specing out a Dell R720xd.) Does anyone know if Cachecade helps with Hyper-V? My VM's will be SAP ERP, SRM, ...

 

[Emulex]

yes very much so. It is transparent to the o/s.

The huge benefit that most people don't realize is the offload during a crc(raid-5/6) by caching hot sectors can allow a rebuild to happen 10x faster than a machine that has to balance normal activity and rebuild.

Typically a high priority rebuild can decrease your iops by up to 10X with say raid-6. Caching will make a huge difference and this is often overlooked.

Again use raid-1/10 for PRO (write to ssd) or else.

 

[nedbert9]

Without reading other comments in the thread, I have a bunch of these running in our cachecade 2.0 :

Intel 320 Series 120gb

I tried OCZ Vretex 3's and they did NOT work, they kept dumbing down to 1.5gbps, and performance was trash...so we went with the intel 320's.

Vivi, would you care to offer performance evaluations you've made with your cachecade setup?

 

[sethk]

I see some general Sandforce negatives, but I'm wondering if people have specific experience with 520 drives and cachecade 2.0. I can extrapolate along with all the rest of you, but I'm wondering if anyone has direct Intel 520 + Cachecade 2.0 experience, good or bad.

 

[aqualityplace]

Has anyone had any luck enabling cachecade on an IBM controller with consumer grade SSD cards?

We have been using SanDisk Extreme 240Gb drives (SDSSDX-240G) on our LSI branded cards without any problems. We use them in a clustered array so reliability isn't really an issue for us unless we were very, very unlucky with multiple failures across storage nodes.

However when we add them to our IBM X3650 M4's the card allows us to crate a normal virtual disk volume but as soon as we try to use them for cachecade we cant (either using the MSM or Bios) In the BIOS we get an error which says "The specified drive does not have the appropriate attributes"

All most seems IBM have limited what drives can be used for cachecade. Which I can understand, but why still allow the creation of a virtual disk using the same drives.

The system see's them as SSD drives. I have a ticket open with IBM but I know which direction that is going to go in....

Anyone else had any luck with affordable drives?