Hello,
I'm looking to get some discussion on RAID controllers limits with some of the newer storage technology. Specifically what I'm interested in is if current hardware RAID controllers are presenting bottlenecks to all flash based storage arrays. And also how do current hardware RAID controllers handle things like NVMe drives?
I'm pretty behind the curve on all flash storage and NVMe. But it seems to me that a decent size RAID10 of all enterprise SSD's can be bottlenecked by even the best RAID controllers on the market.
My interest is use in VM hosts. On small scale I've liked the idea of having 2 hosts replicating VM data between them (cheap redundancy) with a hardware RAID and fast local storage to be a great way to go for performance, cost, and reliability. You could leverage things like cachecade if you don't go full flash storage. But with the cost of enterpirse SSD's dropping and plenty of use cases that don't call for tons of space but high IOPS, going with a full flash array isn't that crazy anymore. And it seems like the RAID controllers are getting in the way of that speed though. Things like VSAN are nice and remove the RAID controllers from the equation (for a more software based RAID) but get costly for small deployments.
Thoughts?
I'm looking to get some discussion on RAID controllers limits with some of the newer storage technology. Specifically what I'm interested in is if current hardware RAID controllers are presenting bottlenecks to all flash based storage arrays. And also how do current hardware RAID controllers handle things like NVMe drives?
I'm pretty behind the curve on all flash storage and NVMe. But it seems to me that a decent size RAID10 of all enterprise SSD's can be bottlenecked by even the best RAID controllers on the market.
My interest is use in VM hosts. On small scale I've liked the idea of having 2 hosts replicating VM data between them (cheap redundancy) with a hardware RAID and fast local storage to be a great way to go for performance, cost, and reliability. You could leverage things like cachecade if you don't go full flash storage. But with the cost of enterpirse SSD's dropping and plenty of use cases that don't call for tons of space but high IOPS, going with a full flash array isn't that crazy anymore. And it seems like the RAID controllers are getting in the way of that speed though. Things like VSAN are nice and remove the RAID controllers from the equation (for a more software based RAID) but get costly for small deployments.
Thoughts?