DSS support for Adaptec MaxIQ™ SSD Cache solution

[Robotbeat]

It works fine, but you can't manage it through Open-E, since the Adaptec storage management software included in the Open-E kernel is old. I think you need versiuon 6.3 of the Adaptec software for it to work well with MaxIQ.

[Robotbeat]

It appears that there is now a "small update" that brings you to Adaptec Storage Manager version 6.3. You just have to ask Open-E nicely for it.

[bitbriimp]

bookmarked and b back l8er,i need more info, :-)

[danielroner]

Hi mates, thank you very much for all your assistance. All your suggestions are helps me a lot,,,

[tingshen]

hey guys, I just recalled I got some posting here lol.

Anyway, we went ahead to get the kit and use it on 5805Z. Unfortunately, under Hyper-V R2, the cache seems a little redundant.....and frankly speaking, it doesn't have any performance benefit for write txn...

I think it will be damn good for web server, those heavy read type.....

[rcohen]

For the price of a MaxIQ setup (including SLC SSD), I don't get the benefit of a 32gb SSD cache over 32gb of RAM on the DSS machine.

To me, it seems like the only benefit of an SSD cache is that it persists across reboots. That's nice for a workstation, but it seems useless for a server.

RAM cache is certainly higher performance than SSD.

[SeanLeyne]

For the price of a MaxIQ setup (including SLC SSD), I don't get the benefit of a 32gb SSD cache over 32gb of RAM on the DSS machine.

To me, it seems like the only benefit of an SSD cache is that it persists across reboots. That's nice for a workstation, but it seems useless for a server.

RAM cache is certainly higher performance than SSD.

Remember that DSS doesn't provide any RAM cache for BLOCK IO LUNs/shares, only FILE IO, so in that case the SSD cache provided by MaxIQ would be extremely beneficial.

[rcohen]

Remember that DSS doesn't provide any RAM cache for BLOCK IO LUNs/shares, only FILE IO, so in that case the SSD cache provided by MaxIQ would be extremely beneficial.

Sure, if you disable caching on DSS, then you are totally relying on controller caching. Why would you want to do that?

All I can imagine is the possibility that the MaxIQ cache algorithm may be better for certain data access patterns. If that is truly happening in real-world applications, it seems like a better solution would be do have some more tunable settings on the DSS cache (size of MRU vs. MFU, etc.)

If the SSD cache provided more bang for the buck than RAM, that would be different, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Apparently, MLC SSDs aren't suitable for caching, due to performance and reliability issues with cache write patterns.