Question about CacheCade Pro 2.0

[azev]

Hi all,

I have LSI 9285E card that I've purchased a few months ago and currently very interested in getting CacheCade Pro hardware key for it.
The system is currently setup inside a supermicro 836 chassis with sas2 expander backplane, and I am using 8087 to 8088 to connect the expander to one of the PCI slot.
One of the controller port is connected to the backplane using external 8088 cable, to control 14x 2tb toshiba 7200 HD (raid 10).
The question I have; does cachecade require that I connect the SSD using the other controller port ? or can I use the 2 vacant slot in my backplane.

The system is currently running windows 2008 R2 with free version of starwind to serve up 4 esxi 5.5 host. Will I benefit much from adding cachecade pro 2.0 for my setup ?
Should I look at converting the storage setup to ZFS based system serving only ISCSI to the esxi servers ?

Thank you

 

[Anton aus Tirol]

It's a bad idea to mix StarWind a CacheCade. StarWind turns RAM to cache and that's faster then CacheCade on-board memory (system bus is wider and higher frequency and lower latency compared to PCIe). L2 flash performance with SATA/SAS attached would be the same but StarWind can use PCIe flash as L2 cache and CC cannot do this...

The same about ZFS. Use free RAM as ARC and PCIe or SATA/SAS attached flash as L2ARC and ZIL. RAM is faster L1 cache (the same as in case with StarWind), L2ARC allows to use PCIe attached flash for L2 (faster then SATA/SAS attached to CacheCade) and CC cannot do log-structuring on temp (ZFS, ZIL) or persistent (StarWind, LSFS) basis.

Sure you can replace Windows + StarWind with FreeBSD or Solaris + ZFS. You'll save on Windows license. Not sure you're going to get any points in terms of performance... Also if you can - skip using "networked" storage at all. DAS is always faster (reads and writes go to SAS/SATA/PCIe and not over slower Ethernet/IB to end with SATA/SAS on the "other side"). Use StarWind (or DRBD/HAST if you'll go Linux/FreeBSD) to virtualize DAS directly on hypervisor and make it HA w/o breaking the bank

Hope this helped a bit. Good luck!

 

[flummoxer]

Hi all,

I have LSI 9285E card that I've purchased a few months ago and currently very interested in getting CacheCade Pro hardware key for it.
The system is currently setup inside a supermicro 836 chassis with sas2 expander backplane, and I am using 8087 to 8088 to connect the expander to one of the PCI slot.
One of the controller port is connected to the backplane using external 8088 cable, to control 14x 2tb toshiba 7200 HD (raid 10).
The question I have; does cachecade require that I connect the SSD using the other controller port ? or can I use the 2 vacant slot in my backplane.

The system is currently running windows 2008 R2 with free version of starwind to serve up 4 esxi 5.5 host. Will I benefit much from adding cachecade pro 2.0 for my setup ?
Should I look at converting the storage setup to ZFS based system serving only ISCSI to the esxi servers ?

Thank you

I like the other answer, but to your question ... no, cachecade doesn't require that you connect to the other controller port but it is recommended, as I recall you'll be doubling the data that needs to transfer over that port and with 14x drives you might already be saturating ( too early to do the maths ). I'm still benchmarking my configs but didn't notice a huge difference when I switched cachecade from my shared expander to the open port on my 9271-8i ( 10x wd red drives ). fwiw in benchmarking raid 10 it helped in random reads, oddly slowed down sequential reads and with the cc volume as raid1 it hurt writes, raid0 cc and read only was the best for raid 10 so far.

 

[minimini]

It's a bad idea to mix StarWind a CacheCade. StarWind turns RAM to cache and that's faster then CacheCade on-board memory (system bus is wider and higher frequency and lower latency compared to PCIe). L2 flash performance with SATA/SAS attached would be the same but StarWind can use PCIe flash as L2 cache and CC cannot do this...

Since you compared product capabilities, it would be nice to know the price gap as well.

Can you please give us idea of the StarWind product price; the price is only on demand, which sounds that it can be expensive and would be nice to have price as the part of the comparison as well.

Thx a bunch !

 

[T_Minus]

@minimini 3yr/old thread and @Anton aus Tirol was last seen in 2016.

Hope tagging him here helps him get notified.