Proliant buying advice
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These are the controller options:
Can anyone tell me the difference between "Flexible" Smart Array Controllers and the others. What are the ports for (and why would I want 2 ports rather than 1)?
Will a 4GB always be faster than 2GB, or will it only have an effect if the 2GB gets filled whilst writing to disk and therefore has to wait (I'm not sure if I'm talking crap here or not)?
What is FIO?
And what does 'ar' stand for in the name P440ar?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Will a 4GB always be faster than 2GB, or will it only have an effect if the 2GB gets filled whilst writing to disk and therefore has to wait (I'm not sure if I'm talking crap here or not)?
Not "always" but anytime that you are doing any amount of disk IO. If you don't have a total of 2GB of storage, for example, then 4GB of cache would be overkill. But given the size of modern storage (and certainly with your database being more than 2GB and your OS being larger than 2GB) you are into a range where yes, 4GB will always be faster. There is no situation where you will not use at least 2GB of disk reads or writes on any given boot up. That number is just so tiny compared to the size of your storage that while technically it might be too big for some workloads, no real world ones and certainly not yours. You would be safe buying 16GB or more of cache and knowing for certain that bigger kept meaning faster.
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FIO, I believe, refers to "Flexible IO" and means that it is neither internal nor external but has both. That's why you see internal, external or FIO as the options. Never Internal FIO or External FIO.
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Each port is another full SAS channel with full SAS bandwidth. You want that if you have a place to use it. You don't, so does not matter to you. It is often used when you have an internal array and an external array or a massive internal array that you want to split.
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I can't figure out what "ar" stands for but it appears that it means that it is a mezzanine card rather than an add on card.
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Hmm.... not sure then. HP is bad about listing their acronyms anywhere.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I can't figure out what "ar" stands for but it appears that it means that it is a mezzanine card rather than an add on card.
Ah, I see. It does look different:
I'm advised that I can't currently get a DL380 without a P440ar/2GB, so it would be a case of throwing it away and replacing it with a P440/4GB. I'd effectively be buying two cards, even though I only used one. I'm not sure it's worth it.
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Is it possible to simply upgrade the RAID controller at a later date if performance becomes a problem, or does that incur a world of pain?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Is it possible to simply upgrade the RAID controller at a later date if performance becomes a problem, or does that incur a world of pain?
Generally pretty painless. Since they are both SmartArrays.
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Cool. I might do that, then. Though those kinds of upgrades always scare me.
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2GB of cache is still four times what you have now and twice what most anyone else has.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Never Internal FIO
Isn't that what I'm seeing here:
I'd guess in this case Int means it's an internal card, though not sure why they would need to specify that.
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@Dashrender said:
I'd guess in this case Int means it's an internal card, though not sure why they would need to specify that.
Internal SAS connections.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I'd guess in this case Int means it's an internal card, though not sure why they would need to specify that.
Internal SAS connections.
So you're ditching what you thought FIO meant?
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@Dashrender said:
So you're ditching what you thought FIO meant?
@Carnival-Boy already showed that I had to be wrong on that.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
So you're ditching what you thought FIO meant?
@Carnival-Boy already showed that I had to be wrong on that.
I was finding a way for you to be right on that, but that Int meant the card was internal...
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Can't really have an external SmartArray
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@scottalanmiller said:
Can't really have an external SmartArray
Yeah - it seems like an unnecessary descriptor to me, but as Carnival-Boy noted, perhaps it's something entirely different.
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@JaredBusch said:
Using the numbers in the post @scottalanmiller linked a few days back it looks like this.
8x drives:
16x drives:
Wow. Thanks. My quick, early morning calculations say that most economical solution is to run lots of low capacity, slow disks (ie 300gb 10k). Here is the comparison of different disks, all giving 4.8TB raw storage. You can see that the best bang for your buck (lowest cost per IOPS) is the 300gb 10k disk. Most Gen9 Proliants support 24 SFF disks, so there is plenty of room. There would be an additional cost of powering the extra disks, but I assume that is minimal, plus double the disks means double the failures. What do you think I should do?
