LSI Cache Cade

[Diavuno]

Anyone have experience with LSI's cachecade?

Did you burn holes in the drive, how much difference did it make?

Do new LSI's come with read cachecade (I seem to recall they came with read, writing was a key and more $$)

 

[Deslok]

We're using it in my office currently and haven't had any issues with the ssd's so far, We're not using a LSI card directly but it's in a thinkserver rd650 with the 720ix, we've got Intel DC3500's which accelerate read plenty, cachecade 2.0 works for both read and write on a licensed card(I think the dell 710 is read and the 730 includes a 2.0 liscense) unless you configure it as read only.

As for how much difference it makes it's huge in our enviroment we get SSD level random reads(which the fileserver does a lot of) and Microsoft's deduplication is transparent to the end users in a ~80 person enviroment, I'd like to get some faster ssd's for it though the dc3500's aren't the best and i'll probably replace as we pick up more vm's and write becomes more of an issue(we're assembling a hyper-v cluster currently)

 

[Diavuno]

thanks!

how did you setup dedupe? and is it for users docs or for VM's?

 

[T_Minus]

@Deslok - Cool info thanks, I hadn't tried my keys yet but you've convinced me to give them a try.

@Diavuno - Before you buy a new one let me know, I'm pretty sure I have numerous spares due to build change a few months ago.

 

[Diavuno]

@T_Minus pm me what you have. some parts for this build are already in transit...

 

[Deslok]

Ours is setup with dedup only on the fileshare, it has a 25TB raid(available after raid 6 on 9 4tb drives) and the ssd's are in a raid 0, I initally split it into thirds(roughly) with 8tb as our fileshare and 8tb a vm enviroment with no dedup and a fixed iscsi target for a vmware esxi 5.1 server, I'm using the third that wasn't allocated for building our new hyper-v server and will be expanding the file-share when i'm done, I haven't decided if i'll run dedup against that(they hyper-v target) or not there isn't any real need to currently.

 

[Diavuno]

thanks for the info.

VMs and users on one array... how is your performance? how many users?

 

[Deslok]

Performance is fine, there's about 80 users and 20 vm's none of which are huge databases(a few webservers and smaller databases) most of the users are just word docs with 2-3 that work with adobe software and move some large files but the users always see line speed sized transfers and the biggest network moves are typically Disc images when someone leaves(we take a macrium image when someone leaves for data retention)

 

[Diavuno]

sounds just like my biggest client, but i make vmware convertor image the former employees pc.

 

[Deslok]

sounds just like my biggest client, but i make vmware convertor image the former employees pc.

I've thought about doing that with with the hyper-v converter but we already use macrium for deployment so it's on our workstation and a flash drive.

 

[Diavuno]

See I have a personal assistant (I really hurt myself in a motorcycle accident)
I have my assistant move the PC into the lab, then I remotely start converter from my workstation. enter domain creds and it'll do it's thing.

Dont bother with images. we juist wipe and reinstall based on a check list

 

[Deslok]

Images save so much time, systems that used to take 1day plus to deploy(install windows update everything install office and all the software ect.) take an hour now just deploy the image to disk, rename it and attatch to the domain, one windows update pass and you're done.

 

[Diavuno]

do you yank drives? pxe? USB?

 

[Deslok]

do you yank drives? pxe? USB?

Drive pulls and USB depending on what's going on, we have a lot of toughbooks so usb is a given since their drives are in oh so wonderful drive carriers.... desktops we usually pull since it's faster to stick them in a hotswap bay and image them(take and deploy) that way

 

[Diavuno]

I dont need to reminded about toughbooks and parts

*gets the shivers*


ever try to image a macbook? I'm yet to find a method that saves time.

 

[Deslok]

Macrium was able to take an image for retention but we didn't redeploy it to it since they wanted a clean slate and the macbooks belong to design&dev here with the understanding that it doesn't support the macbooks themselves.

 

[Diavuno]

good to know.