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Re: SB40c Storage blade with SSDs?

 
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JHoover
Occasional Advisor

SB40c Storage blade with SSDs?

I am replacing an old database server that was completely I/O bound, and would like to do wo with a BL46x blade with an SB40c storage blade. I/O requirements would probably be met with a RAID 10 array of 4x 60GB SSD, but I didn't know it that was a supported configuration. Has anyone used the SB40c with SSDs (or the SB40c in general) with good results?
Silence is golden, duct tape is silver
9 REPLIES 9
Prokopets
Respected Contributor

Re: SB40c Storage blade with SSDs?

Hi!
SSDs are supported on this blade. Here's quickspecs: http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12587_div/12587_div.HTML
As for results, you can look here: http://www.tpc.org/tpce/results/tpce_perf_results.asp Fujitsu is on the second place with cheap SSDs and i think that's really not bad result :).

Regards,
Philipp.
JHoover
Occasional Advisor

Re: SB40c Storage blade with SSDs?

Right, I saw that they're available for purchase with the blade and in the quickspecs. I guess I'm more wondering if anyone has put several SSDs in an SB40c, and if so, what their experience has been, what kind of throughput they got, etc.

Thanks.
Silence is golden, duct tape is silver
juan quesada
Respected Contributor

Re: SB40c Storage blade with SSDs?

i have set up an bl460c g6 + sb40c + ssd + p4000 left hand to have a virtual SAN via iSCSI to 2 xen servers and 2 esx servers connected via iSCSI.
I have a flex-10 so we have 10Gb connections internally and the sb40c Virtual SAN performace is great. i dont have bottlenecks and vmotion works awesome.

honestly, my enviroment does not have a heavy load on the sb40c however this one is under utilized with what i have.
David Claypool
Honored Contributor

Re: SB40c Storage blade with SSDs?

Have you looked into this IO accelerator: http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/io_accelerator/index.html

All in all, it is higher performance and would be less expensive than SB40c + SSDs.
JHoover
Occasional Advisor

Re: SB40c Storage blade with SSDs?

Thanks for the replies, glad to know people are using it successfully. I originally had doubt cast by my reseller, who seemed to think that the SSD/RAID in SB40c wasn't a supported config.

On the I/O Accelerator, that was my original first choice, but it was nixed by management because of the inability to have a mirrored set with hardware RAID, and the relative "newness" of SSDs in our organization.
Silence is golden, duct tape is silver
JHoover
Occasional Advisor

Re: SB40c Storage blade with SSDs?

Juan,
Meant to give you 10 pts, but apparently dropped it to 7 when I hit the down arrow to move down the page. If you want to copy/paste your reply, I'll rate it properly.
Silence is golden, duct tape is silver
juan quesada
Respected Contributor
Solution

Re: SB40c Storage blade with SSDs?

the i/o accelerator is new for me, i like the idea, will try it.

glad my answer helped, dont worry about the points, you are happy with the answer thats what matter the most
sciunix
Occasional Contributor

Re: SB40c Storage blade with SSDs?

We have the SB40c with an array of 60GB SSDs. You can see some benchies etc. at:

http://www.ntlug.org/Articles/DiskBenchmarks

With that said, there are some things that HAVE to be said. The SB40c with SSD is safe... in that it's supported across many things from Linux to VMware, etc.

The Fusion-io IO Accelerator, while fast, is NOT well supported... it's NOT WELL SUPPORTED... NOT... NOT... NOT...

Fusion-io doesn't WANT to support Linux (for example)... at best they ONLY want to support RHEL and they are VERY VERY VERY VERY slow at delivering updates and the device will NOT function (at all) without those updates. HP is to pressurize the Fusion-io folks... IMHO, HP should tell the Fusion-io people to STICK IT... and see about going with someone else. However, a lot of the Fusion-io competition is WINDOWS only at the moment. Nobody has an open source driver (and I suspect it's because there's some embarrassing nastiness inside of the driver implementations).


Maybe HP should develop their own IO Accelerator technology... at least then there's a chance for successful support.


JHoover
Occasional Advisor

Re: SB40c Storage blade with SSDs?

Excellent, thanks for the post.

I kept meaning to come back and update this posting with my own experiences as well. Ended up going with the SB40c and 5x of the HP (Samsung produced) 60GB SSDs (RAID 10 on 4 drives, plus a hot spare).

System went into production a couple of weeks ago after extensive testing of different RAID configurations, filesystems, mount options, etc.

Unfortunately, all of my raw benchmark data was accidentily lost when we did the final format of the system drives to install clean with everything we had learned, but we were able to pull extremely good performance numbers out.

The database that was previously experiencing severe I/O wait and iostat avgsvc times in the 30-50ms range now services requests in an average of .16ms.

I'm comfortable with the SSDs since this is such a read heavy database. I'd want to go with a drive with longer than 1 yr warranty and certification for "unconstrained workload", if I remember the term, before I'd put a read/write heavy workload in production on them.

There's a chance I have the data on a flash drive, and if I find it, I'll post some of my findings.

Thanks again for all the replies!
Silence is golden, duct tape is silver