SSDs in an enterprise enclosure....

mrbios

mrbios

mrbios

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Rather than complicate this with who what where when and why i'm just interested in your opinion these things:

Would you use standard non-enterprise SSDs in an enterprise enclosure?

If yes the scenario is, 256gb per drive, 4 drives in a RAID6, tiered storage solution, SQL and exchange database storage is the application, what drives do you buy?

If no can you give details as to why?

:)
 
MLC based drives are not designed for enterprise environment I/Os. Let alone the addition IO overhead from RAID6.

Maybe in RAID10, but even then you'll have drives dying every 6 - 12 months. Oh and the drives will tend to fail at similar times, because of the way wear levelling works. :)

SLC for enterprise. Dell's 100GB drives are about £500 after discount.
 
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I'm comparing what i'm being told from two locations and i'm being told that they're ideal for SQL databases due to the writes being infrequent and the databases when setup right don't fragment. (Note that these are small single server SQL databases, we're not talking anything huge here)

That said i'm taking both comments on board and what you've said does have me leaning away from them. At the moment i'm not convinced by either sides though, i need more convincing.

We've just had a bit of a conversation in the office over the whole thing and come to the conclusion between two of us that reliability should be favoured over raw performance, at the end of the day we'll get a fair bit of a performance boost by using 10 or 15k SAS drives anyway as currently we're running our VMs off 4 x 7200rpm 2TB SATA drives in RAID6 anyway.

The idea of SSDs is something which was bought up in a conversation over our new storage solution (Thecus N12000 enclosures - of which we're getting two, sitting them in two seperate buildings and having them replicate) Tiered storage still sounds a good idea from the aspect that things like domain controllers, file server etc. can all run from the SATA disks while more intensive systems such as our SQL server, exchange server etc can all run off the SAS disks, but i think the SSD idea may have been a non-starter.
 
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I've found these "OCZ Talos C Series Solid state drive 230 GB" at an ocuk competitor for £436 per drive, now that's not far off being affordable, but they say in the specs they use MLC technology.

I noticed intel now have some MLC enterprise drives (710 series) due to various bits of work with the controller that has made it possible, anyone have any opinion on these drives?

EDIT: then again, the C series talos drives have a much lower NRE than the R series which are nearly £100 more expensive. That said £530 for 200GB is still the cheapest i've found.
 
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After trying to use desktop SSD in RAID environments I can say its a crap idea. Enterprise MLC does exist though and is pretty good. The performance of the desktop ones was alright but the Enterprise ones stomped them in IOPs.

Seagate make great SSDs, the are Enterprise MLC (Pulsar.2) or SLC (Pulsar.XT),
 
You should see a big performance boost going from 4 sata in raid6 to sas. Why are you using raid6 with 4 disks anyway? you loose two to parity and performance is crap might aswell go with raid10? are these consumer drivers or enterprise?
 
Ringiho said:
Seagate make great SSDs, the are Enterprise MLC (Pulsar.2) or SLC (Pulsar.XT),
Click to expand...

With a nice starting price at nearly £1k for 100gb :p

droyden said:
You should see a big performance boost going from 4 sata in raid6 to sas. Why are you using raid6 with 4 disks anyway? you loose two to parity and performance is crap might aswell go with raid10? are these consumer drivers or enterprise?
Click to expand...

Enterprise, redundancy and reliability are more important in the area they're used than performance :) (and performance is generally pretty good)
 
The Intel 710s are interesting from a cost and capacity perspective, with sufficient IO to replace at least 12 x 15k disks, as well as significantly lower access times. You will need to assign 20% free space on them though, as this adds significantly to their longevity.
Anandtech, Tomshardware, StorageReview and TheSSDreview all have reviews of those units.

I've only ever seen and dealt with SLC in the enterprise space, simply because it's not worth the time and effort messing around with other things. Enterprise MLC doesn't look that bad though.
 
I noticed the other day that in some ProLiant QuickSpec's HP now list "Enterprise Performance" SSD (SLC) and "Enterprise Mainstream" SDD (MLC). Both are 6G SAS and are marked with a 3 year warranty.

A 200GB MLC is over £2000+VAT (trade) though :eek: A 200GB SLC is £4400+VAT (trade)...

{Edit}

Just spotted some 3G SATA drives in the QuickSpec for the ML350 G6. A 200GB SFF (MLC) is a snip at £1760+VAT trade. Still gets a three year warranty unlike HP SATA HDs.
 
Ringiho said:
Ah we can get the 100GB at a small £500 each! ;)



The Intel 710s are a good shout as well, good drives and slightly cheaper.
Click to expand...

So far the best i've been able to find is the OCZ Talos R series for £500 :( If they were £400 they'd be a viable option.
 
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