Those are very interesting articles, thank you very much!
Those are very interesting articles, thank you very much!
Hello,
I'm having a dilema and I was wondering if you all could help me decide what to do? We currently have a Promise Technology JBOD full of 16 - Intel 320 SSDs - 120GB per drive. We want to upgrade these SSDs but unfortunately Promise has given us only a small list of SSDs to choose from that are deemed compatible with their hardware. So we have narrowed it down to two choices and we are trying to decide between Intel DC S3700s or Crucial M500s. Here is a couple of links to reviews on each:
Intel DC S3700 Review:
http://www.storagereview.com/intel_ssd_dc_s3700_series_enterprise_ssd_review
Crucial M500 Review:
http://www.storagereview.com/crucial_m500_ssd_review
Based on the SQLIO test that Epicor recommends that we run on our SAN to determine if it can deliver good performance, it seems to me that Random Write speed is most critical when it comes to the drives that the database is using. The Crucials can get 80,000 IOPS for 4KB Random Writes and it looks like Intel can get no more than 36,000 IOPS for 4KB Random Writes. Which makes me lean more towards the Crucials. But then then life of the Crucials is about half that of the Intels. Although considering the price difference between the two maybe we can afford to replace the Crucials as they fail? So what is the most important thing to look at when choosing a SSD? I was also told that the Crucials were more for desktops and the Intels were more of the Data Centers but I'm not sure how true that is... I was just wondering if anyone could share their thoughts or suggestions to help me lean towards one SSD over the other? Right now we have Epicor 9.05.702 installed on our current SSDs. We want to upgrade those SSDs in preparation for eventually upgrading to ERP10.
Thank you for any help you can provide on this!
-Heather
>> lean towards one SSD over the otherSorry, no ideas on choosing a brand.
Just thought you might find this recent article on SSD's interesting.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/22/facebook_reveals_ssd_failure_rate_trough/
http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pub/flash-memory-failures-in-the-field-at-facebook_sigmetrics15.pdf
I asked the smartest IT guy I know and got one heck of a responce.....See below
It's difficult because the way they do modern SSD's doesn't make it so cut & dry. There's a difference between SLC & MLC setups, but they do more things with controllers, different partitions, etc. now that make them more reliable. Just some quick thoughts:
#1 - running an enterprise server on consumer hardware is nuts (Crucial may be faster, but Intel is specifically rated for Enterprise usage)
#2 - running a database server on JBOD is nuts (RAID is OK tho, if they use that option in their Promise box)
#3 - more IOPS = more better for DB's. if you have redundancy & a gameplan for staying on top of upgrades, the risk may be worth the performance boost.
#4 - if they are seriously considering consumer drives, get a pair of 960GB G.Skill Phoenix cards instead. 3x as many IOPS for $1k per card. One live, one spare with nightly backups that can be remapped in under a minute should the primary faily. Since it's a PCIe card, it's directly jacked into the server as well for maximum RW speeds.
http://gskill.com/en/product/fm-pcx8g2r4-960g
#5 - alternatively, see if the Promise supports OWC Enterprise drives. They have the equivalent of battery-backup built-in, which gives me more confidence about enterprise use. Not cheap though:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Mercury_6G/Enterprise
It depends on how many users they have & how good their onsite nerd is. Like for us where we have 3 sites using the DB for 3 shifts, no way any consumer-grade stuff is going in there because we can't afford the downtime should anything quirk out - it'd just be a huge hassle with Epicor, Comtec, and Dell throwing the bug blame back on us. Epicor is somewhat famous for being goofy on non-server hardware, which is why most everyone runs standard Dell servers for them. But if the local IT can handle doing regular swapouts, keeps spares in the server room, has a tested plan ready to go, then sure, take advantage of the improved performance. SSD's have a limited life, so you have to make sure you stay on top of that in reality so that it doesn't come back to bite you in bad ways, like data corruption.
With Epicor 10, it will be a different story. You can virtualize Epicor 10 so that it is hardware-independent, which makes your hardware options more diverse. You can use stuff like IO Fusion drives. The cheap ones start at $28k & have crazy good specs: (the really high-end ones are $100k+ per card)
http://www.solidstateworks.com/ioDrive2-Duo.asp
So - the safe bet would be to get the Intel Enterprise drives, and keep tabs on their usage digitally so you can swap them out before they get too old & start corrupting. The risky option is the Crucials, which can more than double your write speed, but are not specifically rated for enterprise usage and have a shorter production life. But if they're supported in the Promise equipment, then at least they've been tested in a RAID-style configuration for compatibility (a lot of SSD drives previously had issues going in RAID configs due to the way their chipset was designed).
Hum, I’m getting a little bit of a ‘she’s nutty’ vibe coming
from your IT guy….LOL! Just kidding! 
But seriously, thank you very much for asking him and sending
me his suggestions and thoughts! This has some great points and things to
consider in it. I’ll pass this along to our group for us to discuss further. We
are running our database server on a JBOD and it is in a RAID configuration and
we have another onsite SAN and an offsite SAN that we replicate out to. I appreciate
the consumer grade SSD recommendations and links that he gave. We have about
120 users and our IT ‘onsite nerd’ (LOL) is pretty good and has already had to
do some swapouts of our current SSDs. We are going to eventually use these SSDs
for a virtual ERP10 environment. So it’s good to learn more about and validate
the pros and cons of going with the Intel SSDs versus the Crucial SSDs. Thank
you again for taking the time to ask and share the information you got from
your IT guy and please thank him for all of the valuable information! We really
appreciate it! 