Suggestions for advanced/corporate use

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dustyny
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Suggestions for advanced/corporate use

Post by dustyny »

I understand that I'm not really the target market for this product, as far as I can tell it is more geared towards end users (gamers, powerusers) but after reviewing a few enterprise class alternatives I have to say you really have a solid contender. I just finished an evaluation of Velobit Hypercache and it works very similarly to Fancycache. Actually Facnycache gives me better performance because Velobit doesn't give me access to tweak any of the settings. They charge a good deal of money for their product and I think that an inexpensive alternative would definitely be able to compete.

Windows 2012 adds a ton of excellent features for storage but they leave a huge gaping performance gap when trying to using SSDs as a cache for HDDs. Storage pools have a very crude (poorly performing) ZFS like journaling system that lets you boost the speed of HDDs but it's tricky to setup and the performance gain isn't great.

For this project I'm using Fancycache as to create a Win2012 SMB server which will host Virtual Machine data for Hyper-V. I'm using an 40Gb infiniband connection to transfer data between the nodes and the SMB storage server and I'm seeing transfer rates top out at about 3GB per sec (due to the PCIe 2 x8 bandwidth limit). I expect that I'll be able to sustain 4-6GB R/W per sec to the various nodes if I span the SSDs across two SAS adapters.

I understand if these suggestions don't make sense for what you guys are looking to do with your product but I thought I'd throw out some ideas just in case.

1) At the moment I have 8xSSDs running in a RAID/Storage Pool. My current issue with this is that I have a trade off, use half of my disks for redundancy wasting a lot of disks or run them in a stripe and run the risk of a failed disk killing the entire SSD cache. I'd love to be able to assign multiple disks to one HDD storage pool, that way if one drive fails the other 7 disks continue operate. That way I could maximize performance and ignore parity/redundancy penalties, plus there is no point to provide redundancy/parity for transient data anyway.

2) Choose the ability to Write through to SSD or HDD. I really need to avoid the huge write drop that comes with using HDD write through but I need there to be some protection from BSOD or power loss.

3) Persistent SSD cache with consistency checking. I've read in another thread that persistent SSD caching isn't being done because of the implication of data being change while the caching software is offline. I think its a very wise decision however this cache is very valuable for a server environment and it would probably take time to rebuild after a restart. I would prefer to have the option to have Fancycache run a data consistency check and come back online once data has been verified consistent or have the ability to force a cache rebuild if the drives need to be brought back online right away.

3) Logging that can be monitored via network management tools like Nagios. That way I can set monitors to alert me if the storage starts to act unexpectedly.

4) CLI & Server core support. Your gui is excellent but Windows server Core will probably have a problem with it, powershell commandlets or a CLI interface would be perfect for this situation. It would also be helpful to be able to script changes via powershell or cmd.

That's all for now, but I'll add some ideas when I get a moment. (I'd love to be able to script testing for instance).
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Support
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Re: Suggestions for advanced/corporate use

Post by Support »

Hi dustyny,

Thank you very much for your suggestions!

Actually we're improving the level-2 caching (SSD) to make it more efficient and effective. Also we're trying to implement the persistent caching.

Many thanks.
Teodosio
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Re: Suggestions for advanced/corporate use

Post by Teodosio »

support wrote:Actually we're improving the level-2 caching (SSD) to make it more efficient and effective. Also we're trying to implement the persistent caching.
Allow me to add that it wouldn't have much sense to have a level 2 cache if it is not persistent... unless the cache size is very small! But since I am planning to use a 30GB cache on ssd it wouldn't be good to have to re-build it at every boot :P
dustyny
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Re: Suggestions for advanced/corporate use

Post by dustyny »

Hey that's excellent news, you guys are so close to what I have in mind for this project, if you can get the SSDS sorted I might able to use this for my business. If things go well then we'll be building a few more storage systems. So we'd be good for a few copies. :)

If you'd like any help beta testing, I'd be happy to do some benchmarking and send you the results.

Imagine a rebuild of 960GB :o :shock:

This is just the prototype, the final config could be 960GB-8TB SSD and 8-24TB HDD depending on the client. :D
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