Open-E DSS V6 With Dell 510 and SFP+ Ports

Hello,

I am considering an Open-E setup with Dell PowerEdge 510, H700 Controller and 2xSFP+ ports for 10G iSCSI Connections.

I have a few questions:

1. Open-E DSS compatibility with SFP+ controllers that are available with the 510.
2. What type of performance is expected from a setup with a Quad core E5645 and 32GB Memory.
3. What backup options available so I could possibly backup data at the DSS level?

I have worked with SAN appliances, and have no experience working with a software such as Open-E DSS. So the questions may sound pretty basic.

Thanks for the help.

1. Yes
2. This CPU is not bad, bad overal system performance depends mainly on RAID possibilities.
3. Backup option for iSCSI is using external backup software to copy data from iSCSI target. There is also volume replication which is necessary in failover but should not be used as the only backup method.

Would it help with performance, if we used 2xE5645, or more memory? What would you recommend in order to get the best out of H700 controller?

What could be the overhead on top of the controller's performance? Would the server memory be used as a write back cache to improve write performance?

Thanks again.

CPU and Memory wont be an effect with the H700 controller as the cache on the controller will be independent of the cpu and mem during normal operations. Only when there is some array/ volume issue where the resources will be used more if there are volume issues due to some raid controller problems.

If your using the iSCSI then enable the Write Back option, this will use some of the memory for performance with your controller. After that will be the amount of data from your initiators, so if you have 50 servers connecting to the DSS targets you might want to look into 10GbE NICs (Intel for example).