Articles from hardware

Vacation Post: EMC Clariion CX4 support SSD Drives

Posted by Jason Massie on Tuesday, August 05, 2008 at 9:36 PM to SSD, hardware
111 Views | 0 Comments |

A beach tip from a cousin in law that works at EMC. Here is the press release. I am not going to go into a lot of txt but this is the tipping point. Get ready for a wild ride. Soon 1GB network connections won't be enough! Related posts: SSD

"Disks are dead, they just don’t know it yet"

Posted by Jason Massie on Saturday, July 26, 2008 at 12:10 AM to SSD, hardware
211 Views | 3 Comments |

I have been drooling over following Texas Memory Systems for a couples years and more recently, BitMicro.

I am not comparing the products that the companies sell because they are different products and the measurements are not the same. These bullets are mainly for drool factor and background for a post that I will refer you too.

 

Texas Memory Systems:

RamSan-400 SSD SAN

• The World's Fastest Storage®

• First solid state disk with 4Gb Fibre Channel interfaces.

• First solid state disk with 4x InfiniBand interfaces.

• Over 400,000 random I/Os per second.

• 3000 MB/s random sustained external throughput.

• Full array of hardware redundancy to ensure availability.

 

BitMicro:

E-Disk® Altima™ 4Gb Fibre Channel 3.5" Solid State Drive

• Up to 640GB of storage per disk on 1" drives.
• 1.6TB on 3.5" drives
• 800 MB/sec Full Duplex Burst Rate
• Up to 55,000 IOPS I/O Rate
• Similar offering on u320 SCSI

Now these are numbers from the manufacturers. Lots of missing info like read\write numbers. Numbers for different sizes of reads and writes etc. However, did I say WOW?

I am making this post because I ran across a blog post by Mike Ault on a FriendFeed conversation.

Mike address's these SSD "lies"

1. Solid state drive technology is very expensive
2. Solid state devices are best when directly attached to the internal bus architecture
3. Solid state drives will only be niche players
4. You can get the same IO rate from disks as from SSD

and he ends with this quote:

I am not afraid to say it: SSD technology is here, it is ready for prime time and it is only a matter of time before disks are relegated to second tier storage. Disks are dead, they just don’t know it yet.

We can only hope so :) I highly recommend reading the whole posts here.

I hope Microsoft is watching this technology. Sure, SQL will like a SSD SAN right now but I bet it could be heavily be optimized to run on SSD.

 

edit: link fixed

Return of the 8 way

Posted by Jason Massie on Monday, June 30, 2008 at 10:08 PM to SQL Server 2008, hardware, consolidation
165 Views | 2 Comments |

It seems like just yesterday Compaq Proliant 8500’s were the bomb with 8 – 550 mhz processors. 4.4 ghz of processing madness! That was even before hyperthreading and multi-cores. Since then, the big 3 server hardware vendors eliminated 8 way machines in their commodity server lines. You still had 8 way options but there were more cost effective configurations because multi-core processors removed the need for 8 way boxes in most cases.

That is until now as HP releases the dl785 g5. Eight sockets capable of running quad-core 2.3GHz AMD Opterons. That is a combined speed of 73.6GHz. They comes with 8GB of RAM but they support 256GB of RAM(512GB when 8GB dimm's become available). The servers, themselves, are going to be relatively cheap compared to the high end SAN's and large amount of memory needed to get the throughput high enough tax the processor sub system. Without a large spindle count\cache and amount of RAM, the system will have an IO bottleneck long before the processors in most cases. Of course, some applications have special needs. :)  

So when will these come into play? I think the biggest use of this box will be for consolidation particularly on SQL Server 2008. Imagine taking 20 or 40 instances on different OS’s, hardware, storage etc and making it one(or even 2 or 3) SQL Server 2008 instance. The environment would be so much easier to manage. The SQL Server 2008 resource governor was made for consolidation. Some of the new features in SQL Server 2008 are going to be CPU hungry like the spatial data, partition parallelism improvements and transparent data encryption.  The data and backup compression features push both ways by lowering IO and increasing CPU with the idea of decreasing execution time. Even if you go to SQL 2005, it would be a nice upgrade for a consolidation box.

Of course, you have to worry about having all of your eggs in one basket but that is another post.

Introducing the dl785 g5:

 

Processor & Memory
Processor type	AMD Opteron™ 8300 Series
Available processors	Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ Model 8354 (2.2GHz) Quad Core AMD Opteron™ Model 8356 (2.3GHz)
Processor cores	Quad
Processor cache	512KB L2 Cache per core 2MB Shared L3 Cache
Sockets	8
Memory type	PC2-5300 Registered DDR2 at 667MHz
Standard memory	8 GB (or 16GB depends on model)
Max memory	256 GB
Memory protection	Advanced ECC

Storage
Storage type	Hot plug SFF SAS
Max internal drives	8 standard, with an option to add 8 more for a total of 16
Removable media bays	1
Expansion slots	11 pci-e (3x16, 3x8 & 5x4) slots
Storage controller	SmartArray P400i (embedded)

Deployment
Form factor	Rack
Rack height	7U
Networking	Embedded dual NC371i Multifunction Gigabit Network controller
Remote management	Integrated Lights Out 2 (iLO 2
Redundant power supply	Optional
Redundant fans	Standard
Warranty - year(s) (parts/labor/onsite)	3/3/3
Additional Warranty Information	Additional Warranty Information.