SATA vs NL-SAS vs SAS For New Array
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You may have heard about servers with hundreds of VMs running on them? Those servers definitely have higher IOPs needs, perhaps not really over what HDDs can provide, but assuming it's just a throughput thing and not the amount of storage thing, SSDs can do with with fewer devices, meaning less heat, fewer parts to fail, etc.
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So the other main question I have is ... RAID1 or RAID10.
I know the consensus is always RAID10. But I also know that @scottalanmiller always says to "be planning our arrays holistically and not after the number of drives is determined" so since I am at square 1 here, i'm thinking of options.
Since my storage requirements are low, would it be acceptable to just buy 2 larger drives and put them in a RAID1 array?
To do (4) 600GB 10K drives would cost ($800). I could also buy (2) 1.2TB 10K drives for ($660). Same amount of storage.
Even as a better example, are the NL-SAS drives. The 1TB drive is $199. The 3TB version of the same drive is $159. (Based on ... inventory, I guess?) Could have more storage for less than half the cost.
I don't want to overcomplicate my situation. (I've been told I like to try to implement enterprise solutions in a SOHO space, which is a mistake.) But I know RAID10 is often considered "the safest of all choices, it is fast and safe".
But would RAID1 also work here, or am I nuts?
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Wholistically. So the question is, how many IOPs do you need? Let's assume you need 400 IOPs. Can you get 400 IOPs from 2 larger HDD drives? probably not.
Standard 7.2K NL SAS gives between 75-125 IOPs per drive. Right away we can see that we can't get enough IOPs using RAID 1, since two drives won't give us the needed 400 IOPs.
Assuming low end you need 6 drives in a RAID 0 to get over 400 IOPs, on the high side you need 4. Now with RAID 10, you get 1/2 of all drives for write and all drives for read, so working toward the write side, you would need between 8 and 12 drives to cover your bases on RAID 10. This tells us we need RAID 10.
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@Dashrender All of that completely ignores the onboard cache.
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@brianlittlejohn Its like an extra $30 to get a NL-SAS over an Enterprise SATA drive....
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With De-duplication and Compression and RAID 5/6 Flash drives are cheaper than 10K RPM drives. We did the price comparisons with VSAN 6.2 came out and 10K is officially "dead" unless all your data is encrypted or something.
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@John-Nicholson said:
@brianlittlejohn Its like an extra $30 to get a NL-SAS over an Enterprise SATA drive....
Yeah the NL-SAS stuff is crazy cheap.
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@BRRABill It is also CRAZY slow (like Low latency tape is what we call it). Useless for most workloads without a large cache in front of it.
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@John-Nicholson said:
@BRRABill It is also CRAZY slow (like Low latency tape is what we call it). Useless for most workloads without a large cache in front of it.
Then how is it so many people here are using it for their servers?
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@BRRABill said:
@John-Nicholson said:
@BRRABill It is also CRAZY slow (like Low latency tape is what we call it). Useless for most workloads without a large cache in front of it.
Then how is it so many people here are using it for their servers?
Perspective. I believe @John-Nicholson works ina large place running tons of workloads on each host.
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@John-Nicholson said:
With De-duplication and Compression and RAID 5/6 Flash drives are cheaper than 10K RPM drives. We did the price comparisons with VSAN 6.2 came out and 10K is officially "dead" unless all your data is encrypted or something.
What are you using for De-Dup and compression? Is that something native in hypervisors now? if not, it adds to the cost column.
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@JaredBusch said:
@BRRABill said:
@John-Nicholson said:
@BRRABill It is also CRAZY slow (like Low latency tape is what we call it). Useless for most workloads without a large cache in front of it.
Then how is it so many people here are using it for their servers?
Perspective. I believe @John-Nicholson works ina large place running tons of workloads on each host.
Agreed - HDD might be dead for large companies - big players, but SMB - we have at least a year left, maybe 2.
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@Dashrender said:
@John-Nicholson said:
With De-duplication and Compression and RAID 5/6 Flash drives are cheaper than 10K RPM drives. We did the price comparisons with VSAN 6.2 came out and 10K is officially "dead" unless all your data is encrypted or something.
What are you using for De-Dup and compression? Is that something native in hypervisors now? if not, it adds to the cost column.
There's dedupe in Win2K12 at the OS level, assuming you are deduplicating NTFS file systems. If you are using encryption, that's the only way you will be able to dedupe data.
We use Pure Storage SANs, which support native dedupe at the block level. And it appears that VSAN supports block level dedupe as well.
https://blogs.vmware.com/virtualblocks/2016/02/10/whats-new-vmware-virtual-san-6-2/
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@PSX_Defector said:
@Dashrender said:
@John-Nicholson said:
With De-duplication and Compression and RAID 5/6 Flash drives are cheaper than 10K RPM drives. We did the price comparisons with VSAN 6.2 came out and 10K is officially "dead" unless all your data is encrypted or something.
What are you using for De-Dup and compression? Is that something native in hypervisors now? if not, it adds to the cost column.
There's dedupe in Win2K12 at the OS level, assuming you are deduplicating NTFS file systems. If you are using encryption, that's the only way you will be able to dedupe data.
We use Pure Storage SANs, which support native dedupe at the block level. And it appears that VSAN supports block level dedupe as well.
https://blogs.vmware.com/virtualblocks/2016/02/10/whats-new-vmware-virtual-san-6-2/
Well, you're paying a LOT for those hardware platform - so at that point the extra space gained makes the SSD definitely more worthwhile performance wise. But not many SMB's are dealing with those things.
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@Dashrender said:
@PSX_Defector said:
@Dashrender said:
@John-Nicholson said:
With De-duplication and Compression and RAID 5/6 Flash drives are cheaper than 10K RPM drives. We did the price comparisons with VSAN 6.2 came out and 10K is officially "dead" unless all your data is encrypted or something.
What are you using for De-Dup and compression? Is that something native in hypervisors now? if not, it adds to the cost column.
There's dedupe in Win2K12 at the OS level, assuming you are deduplicating NTFS file systems. If you are using encryption, that's the only way you will be able to dedupe data.
We use Pure Storage SANs, which support native dedupe at the block level. And it appears that VSAN supports block level dedupe as well.
https://blogs.vmware.com/virtualblocks/2016/02/10/whats-new-vmware-virtual-san-6-2/
Well, you're paying a LOT for those hardware platform - so at that point the extra space gained makes the SSD definitely more worthwhile performance wise. But not many SMB's are dealing with those things.
Which is very true. I work for a multi-tenant environment, so it's worth a few bucks to get the performance edge on those things. Dedupe is just an added bonus.
Which also brings up the fact that one should be hosting with us! We have the hardware one can only dream about. Why try to keep up when you can spend the cash on hosting which will take care of all of that for you?
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@PSX_Defector said:
@Dashrender said:
@PSX_Defector said:
@Dashrender said:
@John-Nicholson said:
With De-duplication and Compression and RAID 5/6 Flash drives are cheaper than 10K RPM drives. We did the price comparisons with VSAN 6.2 came out and 10K is officially "dead" unless all your data is encrypted or something.
What are you using for De-Dup and compression? Is that something native in hypervisors now? if not, it adds to the cost column.
There's dedupe in Win2K12 at the OS level, assuming you are deduplicating NTFS file systems. If you are using encryption, that's the only way you will be able to dedupe data.
We use Pure Storage SANs, which support native dedupe at the block level. And it appears that VSAN supports block level dedupe as well.
https://blogs.vmware.com/virtualblocks/2016/02/10/whats-new-vmware-virtual-san-6-2/
Well, you're paying a LOT for those hardware platform - so at that point the extra space gained makes the SSD definitely more worthwhile performance wise. But not many SMB's are dealing with those things.
Which is very true. I work for a multi-tenant environment, so it's worth a few bucks to get the performance edge on those things. Dedupe is just an added bonus.
Which also brings up the fact that one should be hosting with us! We have the hardware one can only dream about. Why try to keep up when you can spend the cash on hosting which will take care of all of that for you?
Which is what company? The profile here doesn't say, and it's kinda silly to not get a good self-promotion in with that!
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@BRRABill said:
I guess my thinking was faster is always better.
If money was not an object, would this be true?
Money is always an object
Reliability and capacity are big deals too. Most people see those as the biggest factors.
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SSDs are almost always just for database servers. Things like applications servers and AD DCs really never touch the disk and things like email and file servers often can't leverage the SSD IOPS for pushes files to clients.
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@travisdh1 said:
@PSX_Defector said:
@Dashrender said:
@PSX_Defector said:
@Dashrender said:
@John-Nicholson said:
With De-duplication and Compression and RAID 5/6 Flash drives are cheaper than 10K RPM drives. We did the price comparisons with VSAN 6.2 came out and 10K is officially "dead" unless all your data is encrypted or something.
What are you using for De-Dup and compression? Is that something native in hypervisors now? if not, it adds to the cost column.
There's dedupe in Win2K12 at the OS level, assuming you are deduplicating NTFS file systems. If you are using encryption, that's the only way you will be able to dedupe data.
We use Pure Storage SANs, which support native dedupe at the block level. And it appears that VSAN supports block level dedupe as well.
https://blogs.vmware.com/virtualblocks/2016/02/10/whats-new-vmware-virtual-san-6-2/
Well, you're paying a LOT for those hardware platform - so at that point the extra space gained makes the SSD definitely more worthwhile performance wise. But not many SMB's are dealing with those things.
Which is very true. I work for a multi-tenant environment, so it's worth a few bucks to get the performance edge on those things. Dedupe is just an added bonus.
Which also brings up the fact that one should be hosting with us! We have the hardware one can only dream about. Why try to keep up when you can spend the cash on hosting which will take care of all of that for you?
Which is what company? The profile here doesn't say, and it's kinda silly to not get a good self-promotion in with that!
For various reasons, I don't mention who I work for, be it my previous employer Big Red V or my current one. Gotta maintain separation of professional and personal life.
Let's just say it's not Amazon, but if you follow cloud hosting, you would know who we are.
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@brianlittlejohn said:
I run 7200 SATA almost everywhere...
Here as well, we are after space & price not speed
