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Has anyone had any experience with using consumer SSDs in servers? Things started moving that way for me when HP was putting a 6 week hold on any server order with hard drives late last year and early this year due to the nastiness in Thailand. At first, I just ordered them with no HDD and booted from SAN, but for some things, it makes more sense to have DAS for your boot volume at least. I ordered a few Intel 520 series earlier this week to do some testing. I like the fact that Intel puts write statistics into their SMART status, so I should be able to keep an eye on write amplification and NAND wear. Other than this, my only SSDs in the data center are for a small but read heavy Oracle DB server. I put an array of 4 60GB Samsung SLC (HP OEM) drives in that, but they cost me like $800/each. I'm thinking that running an MLC drive that allows watching the statistics, and costs 75% less, would be a better use of the money. Even if I have to replace the consumer drives every year or two, I'd still be way ahead money wise vs the SLC or eMLC drives.
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Mar 8, 2012 17:46
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I figured by doing a RAID1 and replacing them proactively as they get nearer to used up, I shouldn't have much downtime to worry about. I was thinking that at 50% life or so, replace it with a new drive, and put it in one of the Admin laptops or something.
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Mar 8, 2012 20:58
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KS posted:Just curious, do they fit in the 2.5" bays on DL-series servers? The standard 2.5" drive for a server has a 15mm Z, most consumer level SSDs are either 7mm or 9.5mm. If you're screwing into it from the bottom, you'll probably need to shim it up so the SATA connecter is in the right place, but if you're screwing it in from the sides, things *should* line up. The Intel 520s are mostly 7mm drives with a 2.5mm plastic shim attached, as far as I can tell. I ordered some of them earlier this week and they'll be going in a DL360, so I'll let you know my experience when they arrive.
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Mar 9, 2012 16:59
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Wow, I'm really glad I didn't end up with the 3210 and PAM that I was quoted last year about this time. I hadn't heard about this issue until now, but it makes my decision feel even better.
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Mar 14, 2012 22:40
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three posted:Compellent is absolutely terrible. We were given a unit due to the amount of business we do with Dell, and it's a pile of junk. That's quite odd... What series controller(s)? What version of Storage Center are you running? I've had nothing but extremely good experiences with Copilot, and never had a problem getting the help I need. Yes, it's a little annoying that you have to call and open a case to update the firmware/Storage Center software. But it's nice that when you do, they remote login and do a health check before releasing the software. If you set up an alert in Knowledge Center, you'll get an email notifying you whenever there's a new version, and then you can call in and start the case. I've had mine about a year (SC40 controllers, on 5.5.6 OS right now) running VMware and Oracle Database backends. I have plenty of thin-provisioned VMDKs that were storage-vmotioned over from an old array, but I don't see problems with that. I've never had my controllers lock up, and never had Copilot reboot either of my controllers. I routinely hit 300-600MB/sec and 11K IOPS during busy times, with latency staying below 4ms. Don't you get a survey link every time you open a case? If you're really having that many issues, I'd give a negative survey response and wait for the calls to come in. I rated something negatively the first time a Dell contractor came out to replace a part, and had never worked on any of the Compellent gear. He wasted over an hour reading manuals for a cache card replacement. I got a call from a manager asking for more details a few hours after I submitted the survey. The next time I had someone out (their lab had identified a problem in some limited cases with Emulex 8Gb FC cards, so they proactively replaced them with Qlogic 8Gb FC cards) the same guy came out. He said that he got a call asking him to schedule some Compellent training at Dell's expense after the last time he was out, and was a lot more comfortable working on them now. I've been nothing but pleased so far.
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Apr 30, 2012 21:13
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Previous arrays were HP EVAs, just retired my EVA 4000, still have an EVA 4400 in production. My job doesn't have enough people to have a dedicated SAN Admin, and I wouldn't say that I've got a particularly high-end deployment, but it's not really low end either. The fact that SAN is just one of many things I do (VMware, AIX, Linux, Network) is what pushed me toward the Compellent. It's easy enough to configure and use without having to dedicate exclusively to that. As for VAAI, Storage Center 6.0 supports Full Copy Offload and Hardware Assisted Locking too. Meh, I'm sorry you've had bad luck with it. Since you got it for free and hate it, if you wanna send it my way, I'm sure I could figure out something to do with it.
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Apr 30, 2012 21:55
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KS posted:Get SC 6. It's been out for months. That's admittedly about a year later than it should be, but it supports the full VAAI feature set. That's right, I remember our conversation now. You gave me your SR number which I relayed to them. My bad, I guess I should have said, "Their lab was able to reproduce and verify the problem discovered by KS." Credit where credit is due, thanks for your help. I'm just about to add more disk to Tier 3, at which point I'll be up to about 115TB total between two arrays. Offer still stands to take the array off your hands, three.
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May 3, 2012 18:09
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cheese-cube posted:Oh and sorry about the I, for one, value this thread specifically for the  that go around. It's nice both to be able to vent to other people who understand what you're dealing with, as well as to learn something about other peoples experience. So thanks, and keep the coming.
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May 29, 2012 15:25
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Mierdaan posted:Obviously, anyone using S4 for their Exchange backend storage. That is outstanding.
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Jun 28, 2012 23:15
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NippleFloss posted:Technically a SAN is the network infrastructure that connects clients and arrays to provide block level storage from the latter to the former. This bugs me more than it should, especially when I fall victim to doing it so other people know what I'm talking about. You wouldn't call a server or a switch a LAN.  I won't say much else because I'd just be echoing the people above. Block vs File is the main differentiation, as has been more eloquently explained already.
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Jul 3, 2012 22:07
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Zero VGS posted:Yeah I see what you mean, the thing doesn't even have USB. Back to the drawing board. Sorry for the necromancy, but this provided me so much joy/horror, I couldn't not bring it back. What did you end up getting? I think I'll be decommissioning some older boxen in the near future if you're still needing something.
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May 13, 2013 22:16
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