The Latest Gartner® Magic Quadrant™Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software
Moderators: anton (staff), art (staff), Max (staff), Anatoly (staff)
Aitor_Ibarra wrote:Performance and tuning really depends on your use case, which you haven't really explained. However, I can guess a bit from your hardware spec...
1) You have only one HBA which has 2 x4 SAS connectors, each channel capable of a max bandwidth of 600MB/sec full duplex. Therefore you have up to 600x4x2 = 4800MB/sec to your storage. However, PCIe limitations (x8 PCIe 2.0) and the limits of the card are going to mean you are limited to more lile 3000MB/sec max IIRC.
2) You have 6x2 = 12 10GbE ports - each one capable of up to 1000MB/sec bandwidth to your iSCSI intiators (clients). So you have a total of 12000 MB/sec to your clients
3) You have 96GB of RAM which could be mainly used as cache by Starwind
That motherboard has enough PCIe bandwidth to not be a bottleneck so in theory you should be able to saturate your SAS and 10GbE if you are capable of providing enough demand from your initiators. Unfortunately your storage, in most workloads, isn't going to saturate your single HBA, which in turn isn't going to provide enough bandwifth to saturate your Ethernet connections, so unless most of your workload is in WB cache you will not be able to saturate all those 10GbE connections.
I don't know what those STEC SSDs are capable of, but the most SAS can do is 600MB/sec per drive. Maybe do your most write-IOP intensive stuff on the SLC and then do a RAID-0 or RAID-1 + Hotspare of the MLCs for slightly less IOP heavy.
If your workload is mostly sequential access of highly random data - e.g. uncompressed HD video - then I would put the hard drives into a big RAID (0 for speed & capacity, 10 for speed & reliability). If the reason you have 12 10GbE ports is that you have 12 clients and they could all be accessing different data, then use multiple, smaller RAIDs.
If your data access is highly random but the most accessed subset of the data can fit on your SSDs or even your RAM, then use them with LSI CacheCade, so you have a double layer cache of 96GB RAM -> xxGB SSD -> xxTB HD.
If there is a high level of duplication - e.g. you are going to run a bunch of VMs running the same OS, I strongly suggest you look at dedupe as it will make better use of your RAM/CPU.
Hope this helps.
EDIT: who made me Superman?! It's not very accurate, I have many more weaknesses than just kryptonite...
Aitor_Ibarra wrote:
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EDIT: who made me Superman?! It's not very accurate, I have many more weaknesses than just kryptonite...
awedio wrote:No updates yet, was hoping to "acquire" a few more Seagate 1TB NL-SAS drives.
These 2.5" drives are not easy to find at a reasonable price!!
Hope to start later this week!!
anton (staff) wrote:I did! I always pick up an avatars for people who stick with this community (make some level of posts). Trying to keep them as personalized as possible
Aitor_Ibarra wrote:
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EDIT: who made me Superman?! It's not very accurate, I have many more weaknesses than just kryptonite...
awedio wrote:Anton,
I will definitely keep you posted.
Slight delay, as I have to return the STEC 200GB SLC SSD sample (Z16IZF2E-200UCU).
It's replacement will be the 100GB version (Z16IZF2E-100UCU)
awedio wrote:Is my Avatar Darth Vader?
btw, is Anatoly any good at soccer?
anton (staff) wrote:I did! I always pick up an avatars for people who stick with this community (make some level of posts). Trying to keep them as personalized as possible
Aitor_Ibarra wrote:
...
EDIT: who made me Superman?! It's not very accurate, I have many more weaknesses than just kryptonite...
50% is not a problem for these STEC SSDs (reading from their whitepaper)anton (staff) wrote:These are good ones! At least you're not going to blow your SSDs with your performance tests BTW, make sure you don't fill them more then 50% as they will have performance degradation.
awedio wrote:50% is not a problem for these STEC SSDs (reading from their whitepaper)anton (staff) wrote:These are good ones! At least you're not going to blow your SSDs with your performance tests BTW, make sure you don't fill them more then 50% as they will have performance degradation.
According to STEC, this is what separates good SSDs from great SSDs
http://www.stec-inc.com/downloads/white ... e_SSDs.pdf