Looking for recommendations or ideas

[Cable God]

I'm going to be replacing all of our servers & storage over the next 8-10 months and would like to hear SSD recommendations from you guys (and gals).

I've been looking at enterprise-class SSD such as Fusionio, Texas Memory Systems, Violin Memory Systems, etc.

I did look at the OCZ Z-Drive R2 P88 1 & 2TB versions, and like the storage/cost of them, but I am gunshy of their support & turnaround times for replacement hardware. I also question the lifetime of MLC.

I am looking into the Intel X25-M (the E only goes to 64GB AFAIK), and like the 160GB version. What I am wondering is if I should be looking at the Sandforce-based drives too.

I need them to last for 3 years minimum in a write-heavy environment, which is why I am wondering about the viability of MLC.

When I say write-heavy, I mean Oracle DB storage (we are a OPN developer, and develop for the Oracle RDBMS), app server storage, and Hyper-V storage.

SAN is not an option because we require isolated storage to keep disk-contention from being an issue for our Oracle environments.

What do you guys think of something like 14x OWC 200GB drives in hardware RAID10?

Cost isn't a factor, but sensibility is.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

For consumer stuff I hate it when people give the answer "wait for Intel to revolutionize the market here in Q4". But for enterprise stuff, it just may be worth waiting. I believe they're changing MLC a bit to make it halfway between current MLC design and current SLC design. I can't remember any details and may have that wrong, but you may want to look into it if that piques your interest at all.

With IMF Tech (Intel/Micron) set to double (or more) NAND capacities it could heavily influence what's available for your application over the next 6 months. That's not to say you couldn't phase it of course, such as buy some current tech for some of your servers, and buy more later, etc.

 

[sumeet.bansal]

Hi, I am the Principal Solutions Architect at Fusion-io and would love to chat with you about your requirements. Looks like you are evaluating options and I would like to help in any way possible.

Fusion-io technology allows one to create high-density solutions with minimum points of failure and without much wastage of usable capacity due to RAID. Please do not hesitate to contact me at Sumeet@fusionio.com.

thanks.

 

[Old Hippie]

I've read about the Fusion-io uber drives and that's about as close to one as I'm gonna get.

Nice! :thumbsup:

 

[sub.mesa]

Hi, I am the Principal Solutions Architect at Fusion-io

The specs of your products say around 100.000; but what kind of random write IOps can the Fusion card do with 512 byte and 4K workloads? Single queue/multi queue; do you happen to have some more information about that?

And do they have supercaps to allow for safe operation in a database setup?

 

[Cable God]

I just finished testing the FusionIO iodrive 320gb model and was sort of disappointed when compared to the OCZ Z-Drive. These tests were done using SQLIO.

FIO IOPS: http://imgur.com/Y5YUz.png

FIO MB/s: http://imgur.com/UyQkC.png


OCZ IOPS: http://imgur.com/aC2GI.png

OCZ MB/s: http://imgur.com/J2VR7.png


Edit:

Further testing with 4, 8, and 16 threads showed that the OCZ can only outpace the Fusion IO SSD in raw read speed only. The Fusion IO decimated the OCZ in IOPS and write performance where the number of threads were increased.