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Hi
Could someone tell me if Open-E is compatible or has drivers for the Texas Memory Ramsan 20 and Ramsan10 PCI-e Flash Disks.
I want to build a storage device using Ramsan20 PCIe Flash cards instead of mechanical drives.
Has anyone done this yet ?
here are the Ramsan20 specs: http://www.ramsan.com/products/ramsan-20.htm
Thanks
Having researched Solid State Storage for my business extensively over the last 15 months (we even purchased a Fusion-IO 80GB ioDrive card), I would recommend that you adopt a different solution.
An array of SSDs (Intel X25-E or X25-M) connected to a good write cached disk controller.
Unless your SAN solution will have *multiple* 40Gb/s Infiniband connection there is no way that you could generate enough network traffic to exercise a PCIe based flash storage solution (RAMSAN, Fusion IO, OCZ or SuperTalent).
For $2,044 you can build a 480GB SSD RAID 5 array (4 x Intel X25-M + 3ware 9650 controller w/BBM) which has some fault-tolerance (very few of the PCIe storage solutions offer any hardware fault tolerance.
Sean
P.S. It would be interesting to see what the overhead of the Open-E software RAID would be, cause a SSD storage solution using 2 separate controllers with 4 SSDs in a RAID 10/50 would be perhaps the ideal setup.
FYI, I got a "budgetary" quote for a 450GB RamSan-20 PCIe Flash Card from Texas Memory Systems, last night, the price ... $18,000 USD :eek:
Sean
I am interested in your solution using The Intel X25-E (because of the SLC flash make up)
I want to use this as a storage device for intensive database applications
However how does your solution compare to the compelling performance specs of single Ramsan 10 PCIe. ie:
# 120,000 sustained IOPS
# 700 MB/s random sustained external throughput
# ECC and RAID
# Embedded CPU controller .
The Ramsan has its own on board cpu (other similar devices such as FusionIO don't have this)so there is no impact on the server performance.
So this seems to be an ideal device to build a storage device , multiple PCIe cards in a box running Open E os -
The Question is will OPEN-E see the Ramsan PCI e cards
Hi guys, I'm in Singapore and based on our testing with Intel since Jan 09, the best combi should be Adaptec 5805Z (zero maintenance, meaning no battery) with some X25-M disk array. We are using 8pcs of X25-M 160GB, but frankly speaking, 4pcs is good enough to fly like rocket if capacity is not your top concern.
The lifespan of enterprise class SLC SSD like X25-E is just too overkill. After some calculation and with the help from Adaptec, we opted for X25-M instead. Remember, it only has 3 yr warranty, I haven't seen any application is able to use anything near 30% of the estimated lifespan of X25-M.....and that's based on 5yr estimated usage.
The standalone performance was amazing. If you want to use such combination for Open-E, some X25-M can definitely go beyond the iSCSI (teaming) or even FC connectivity.
Yes, we also got in touch with TMS. Their product is one of the best, but the price is just too high....
We are now running the X25-M & 5805Z combi for almost 1yr in production :D Users are only complaining the applications are just responding too fast, resulted no tea breaks for them anymore.....lol
SeanLeyne, any idea what's the processor used by 3Ware 9650?
Adaptec 5805Z is using Intel IOP348, which is probably the fastest non-SSD optimized storage controller at the moment.....I love the idea of "battery-less"!!!
Quote:
Originally Posted by anca
- The config was a hypothetical one based on my own experience, so I can't comment on performance. I can say that based on my experience with SSDs that the proposed config would be able to meet whatever external access load you could place on it with Open-e.
- The Ramsan values are based on a artificial/benchmarking load levels that would not be experienced in any real world environment you could construct.
- All RAID controllers have their own CPUs, which offload all IO from the server. Only software based RAID solutions use the server CPU. In this respect the Ramsan solution doesn't provide anything special.
I'd really caution you about using consumer-grade SSD for a critical server. You can't trust many of those lifespan figures. We have found that under heavy server loads, consumer SSDs will fail within months. Also, they tend to fail in ways that RAIDs are not able to detect, so you learn about a failed drive when you discover corrupt data!Quote:
Originally Posted by tingshen
As a general rule, SLC SSD is more reliable, but even there, you get a big variety of reliability.
This is an excellent web site that discusses SSD reliability issues:
http://www.storagesearch.com/
The problem is that enterprise-grade SSD is close to the same ballpark as RAM pricing.
For high-performance apps, the TDS and FusionIO options look like they offer a good combination of reliability and performance. We have so much data, though, that it looks like RAID10 SAS + lotsa RAM cache is the best option, at the moment.
Interesting that you need block-IO for auto-failover. Keep in mind that MaxIQ only does read caching.
It would be nice if someone came out with a similar product that could do RELIABLE read caching with MLC SSD, so that it would be cost effective for lots of data.
oops...I meant TMS and FusionIOQuote:
Originally Posted by rcohen