Isn't hardware fun - episode three.

Revenge of the SSD's.

Previously .... our Intel X25E and M's actually degraded our performance in ZFS.

But, the SAS drives in the same backplane and on the same controller card also suffered performance degradation. So, we thought there must be something to SUN's refusal to support mixed SAS and SATA in this system.

Then the quest for a separate controller to run the SATA SSD's started. This quest was complicated by the fact that we needed low profile, PCI-E and opensolaris support. I should have remembered that all I had to do was visit Joe Little's Little Notes blog here: http://jmlittle.blogspot.com/2008/06/recommended-disk-controllers-for-zfs.html . That got me to the LSI 3442ER.

Now the next quest began, what to put the 2.5" SSD's into? Not trusting the X4240 backplane, although it does have two SAS cables running to it, suggesting that it might be a split backplane I started looking around for 2.5" SAS JBOD enclosures. This was harder than I thought. I ended up finding only two. One by AIC which is nice and inexpensive but only comes from resellers we have no previous relationship with or *BANG THE DRUM* HP! Wow, HP has two JBOD's, the MSA50 and the MSA70. Interestingly enough under OS support, HP claims Solaris works on the MSA70 but makes no such claim for the MSA50. A quick e-mail with our friendly HP storage engineer revealed that we could indeed install and 2.5 SATA/SAS drive we wanted and that the carriers for such disks come with the empty JBOD. ( I had to check, so many vendors make sure their stuff only works with drives supplied in carriers only available from them, and the carriers are not available separately - hint to SUN)

Well, when all this stuff arrives and assuming it actually works on the X4240, I will post on whether our attempt to build a SSD enabled ZFS system accomplished anything.

Oooh, for those who would say why don't we just use the SUN Amber Road series which already has this stuff working in it. Well, we have already made a substantial committment to older SUN hardware (Thumpers) and since SUN won't put their latest software developments on their legacy hardware, we thought we would give it a try by re-using a X4240 we already had as a NAS headend to the Thumpers.