Intel SSD x25-Extreme vs. OCZ Vertex 2 SATATII

[jayhawker]

I am building a Web Server using Windows Web Server 2008 R2 which I understand to be based on Windows 7 as for dealing with SSD drives and TRIM. I am getting so much different information for recommendations in other forums, hopefully someone here can clear this up for me. Some are insisting on Intel, swearing they blow away OCZ, but I see performance charts showing the new Vertex 2 consistently performing better then the X25 -Extreme

1.) Does using any form of RAID with Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 create the need to partition the drive only utilizing half of it. I have been told that there is no TRIM when using RAID.

2.) Is the OCZ Vertex 2 with Max Read: up to 285MB/s, Max Write: up to 275 MB/s, Sustained Write: up to 250 MB/s, and Random Write 4KB (Aligned): 50,000 IOPS now competitive with the Intel x25-Extreme drives featuring Sequential Access: Read up to 250MB/s, Sequential Access-Write: up to 170 MB/s (can't find an IOPS spec for random read/write).

Any information would be very much appreciated.

 

[pparks1]

I guess I am confused as to why you would but an SSD drive into a web server. Your biggest bottleneck will be your internet speed by far.

 

[Dave76]

You can check some of the reviews and articles from Anandtech, it's a respected site.

OCZ's Vertex 2, Special Sauce SF-1200 Reviewed
The cost per GB of these drives is still higher than Intel’s X25-M, but you do get a corresponding increase in performance.

 

[jayhawker]

I guess I am confused as to why you would but an SSD drive into a web server. Your biggest bottleneck will be your internet speed by far.

There are actually several reasons, and not all have to do with performance. For example, 5 SSD's vx 5 VelociRaptors would use negligible power (needs smaller power supply) and will run much, much cooler (less fans, allows me to put them into 2U rack and maybe even 1U Rack).

But with regards to performance, wouldn't it be correct to say that with the speedier reads and writes to and from an SQL Database with RAIDED SSD's their would be much less latency in servicing the requests to the host? For example I am thinking that as mutliple users are making multiple requests to the Web Server that anything that can be done to minimize the times for reads and writes would be a big help. I am always learning, so if I am missing something please point it out to me.

Thanks for the reply

 

[zzz2496]

The correct way to do this is to run the web server as a separate "machine" (virtual is preferable) running off a spinning mechanical disk, and another "machine" for database server with spinning mechanical disk for the database server software/OS, and separate arrays for database file/database logs.

But then again, all this falls down to how many users are you serving, if your user does a lot of things and you have a lot of hits per hour (say 6000 hits or more) then maybe using SSD will yield some benefit, BUT that depends to your database server tuning/application tuning/and many other factors. For a small website, running off a SAS disk (15K RPM) is more than enough. And by the way, you don't put SATA disks in "servers", unless we're talking about mid tier backup rack...

zzz2496

 

[HerrKaLeun]

Definitely the Intel. they do more validation testing on this (new) technology. for servers you want to use their enterprise products with SLC chicps. (this applies to all brands). while OCZ sure has some good models, their large variety is confusing and many are slower. the ones that are good are expensive. Intel just has two lines, fast consumer (MLC), fast enterprise. and not fast and slow ones.

Maybe I'm too hard on OCZ, but relaibility on the long run is more important than a split second speed advantage. Compared to HDDs it will be superfast either way.

Random acces time is important. Intel is good at that, also on the long run. Sequential reading and writing Intel is not so good, but that doesn't really matter unless you deal with large files (movies etc.). The OS barely has large files, but accesses them randomly. Likely the case for databases too.

I don't think RAID gives you any advantage with SSD. First, you lose TRIM, second random access time may suffer. And as said before, sequential times are not really important.

 

[jayhawker]

If I take the virtual machine approach, what do you recommend. VMWare?? If so, what version of VMWare? I was expecting to have separate machines for the Server/Database Server/Image Server/State Server, but I like the idea of a virtual machine.

I am using the Intel S5520HCR motherboard, with the new Intel Xeon 5620 Processor, expecting to have 12 GB Ram. I was expecting to only use one processor for now, but I like your recommendation of running the different systems "virtually". Should I go ahead and buy another Xeon X5620, have 18GB RAM, and run VMWare.

I have never used dual processors. Is there anything tricky about it? Does the operating system just recognize the two processors and run twice as fast. I assume they aren't treated as two different systems, right?

Also, I will probably punt the Raid 0 with the SSD's, and instead go with 2 big SSD's, and have them mirroring. Do you see any problem with two SSD's mirrored?

Thanks

 

[HerrKaLeun]

no problem with mirroring except for cost. Only use it if the data are critical.

Raid 0 with smaller SSD: the smaller SSD are slower than larger ones, so you only lose.
the Intel 40 GB SSD has half the chips in parallel as the 80 GB Intel SSD. When you do RAID 0 with 2 40 GB SSD, you come up with approx. same sequential performance as with one 80 GB SSD, but you give up total reliability, access speed and add cost and space needs.

dual CPU: yes, OS recognizes. Speed gain depends on application how multi-threaded it is. but likely not " twice as fast". I doubt anyone really needs more than 4 cores. doing 2 CPUs except in professional things is a waste. But my neighbor might have a Ferrari and still is stuck in traffic jam and speed limit is 65... big waste but to each his own.

 

[jayhawker]

Is VMware what you would recommend, and if so what version would I need for this? I will be handling a lot of photo's (real estate), so would it make sense to store the images on a complete different virtual machine, on the Application server virtual machine, or on the SQL Server Virtual Machine?

Thanks again!

 

[pparks1]

If you want to use VMWare and get the best performance, you will have to use one of their hypervisor products....like ESXi 4.0 U1. This is it's own operating system and there is an approved hardware list from VWare.

With regards to RAM....12-18GB of RAM is quite a bit for your needs. I run a handful of VMWare servers at work and most have 24GB of RAM and run 10-12 machines concurrently with every little issue.

 

[zzz2496]

jayhawker, what is your expected target hits of this web server? Having 18GB mem for just web/db serving is beyond overkill. My Apache/PHP/Postgresql running on an IBM X3650 (dual quad core) with 4GB mem, serving an image intensive website rarely use more than 700MB of memory... Most of the time it's idling with mem usage ~300MB.

As for VMM, VMware ESXi 4 is good, or PROXMOX Linux, both are free...

You need to understand this: High throughput servers are usually storage bottlenecked, but to use RAID 0 in server environment is rather "crazy", since it can fail - you don't want a server to fail (read again the emphasis of word "can"). Use either RAID 10/5/6, never use RAID 0 for ANYTHING except test servers where data is not important. In my setup, I run my X3650 accompanied by a SAN (self built), I offload the database tablespace and logs to the SAN.

zzz2496

 

[jayhawker]

I am leaning towards running 2 Virtual servers, one for the Web App, and 1 for the session state, images, and sqlDatabase. Does that make sense, or would I see performance increases in having all of them in a differerent virtual server?

 

[zzz2496]

The point to get higher performance is not at virtual server partitioning, but rather to which RAID array is the DB server is using. Database workload is very random in nature, web server load is very static, if you use apache, you can install apache cache plugin so that apache won't read from disk when serving static pages. As for DB server, it's best for it to run the data portion at one RAID volume, and log portion at another RAID volume. Read anandtech.com they have discussed this in the past, they love enterprise class computing...

Watch my words, which RAID array it's running on, meaning you'd need multiple RAID arrays to achieve the ultimate database serving speed.

zzz2496

 

[jayhawker]

Thanks for the reply. Looked at your link. Like your taste. I use exactly the same cases for my Towers. Looking at the ESXi 4.0, is it really free? Also, thinking about putting new SSD's in my development system and running Vmware on it as well. I have 3 older development machines that I keep going because they have old software on them that aren't compatible with my new Windows 7 machine. Would it make sense for me to run all of them on my new machine using VMWare, and can you do an image backup on a machine that runs vmware so that if something goes wrong you can restore it exactly as it was before?

 

[pparks1]

Looking at the ESXi 4.0, is it really free?

Yes, it's 100% free. You can license it however to take advantage of the enterprise class features like DRS and Vmotion...but these items require shared storage, etc.

Remember, ESXi is a hypervisor. It is it's own operating system. It's a scaled down version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It may or may not work with your hardware, you will have to check the HCL (hardware compatibility list).

can you do an image backup on a machine that runs vmware so that if something goes wrong you can restore it exactly as it was before?

Yes, you can copy the entire virtual hard drive file (VMDK). You can also perform snapshots within VMWare that you can resort back to. You can use backup software like Macrium or Acronis to make an image. You can even use a script directly on the ESXi box called ghettovcb.sh to copy a live running VM.

 

[zzz2496]

Thanks for the reply. Looked at your link. Like your taste. I use exactly the same cases for my Towers. Looking at the ESXi 4.0, is it really free? Also, thinking about putting new SSD's in my development system and running Vmware on it as well. I have 3 older development machines that I keep going because they have old software on them that aren't compatible with my new Windows 7 machine. Would it make sense for me to run all of them on my new machine using VMWare, and can you do an image backup on a machine that runs vmware so that if something goes wrong you can restore it exactly as it was before?

Pardon me, what link?

Looking at the ESXi 4.0, is it really free?

Yes, it's 100% free. You can license it however to take advantage of the enterprise class features like DRS and Vmotion...but these items require shared storage, etc.

Remember, ESXi is a hypervisor. It is it's own operating system. It's a scaled down version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It may or may not work with your hardware, you will have to check the HCL (hardware compatibility list).

can you do an image backup on a machine that runs vmware so that if something goes wrong you can restore it exactly as it was before?

Yes, you can copy the entire virtual hard drive file (VMDK). You can also perform snapshots within VMWare that you can resort back to. You can use backup software like Macrium or Acronis to make an image. You can even use a script directly on the ESXi box called ghettovcb.sh to copy a live running VM.

Really? AFAIK VMware ESXi is a stand alone product made by VMware, it got nothing to do with Red Hat Enterprise, the hypervisor is VMware's custom hypervisor. VMware develops their own VMkernel, it's true that at first, Linux kernel is loaded, but after that, VMkernel took over...

zzz2496

 

[pparks1]

Really? AFAIK VMware ESXi is a stand alone product made by VMware, it got nothing to do with Red Hat Enterprise, the hypervisor is VMware's custom hypervisor. VMware develops their own VMkernel, it's true that at first, Linux kernel is loaded, but after that, VMkernel took over...

Ooops...my bad. I was thinking of Open Filer which I have often used with VMWare ESXi to provide low cost shared storage space via iSCSI. Open Filer has some components from RHEL built into it.

 

[jayhawker]

The link I was referring to was pparks1 at the bottom http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/b...1/DSC_1299.jpg

Based on feedback, I have decided to go with one machine... a 2U rack with 8 hotswap drive bays, using the Intel S5520HRC mother board and X5650 processor. I am tossing around the possibility of going with less memory since it looks like I can get faster memory if I go with 6 MB or less. Any opinions on this? I am going to go with VMware, running Windows Web Server 2008 R2 on one virtual machine (VM1) with the web app (asp.net), and Windows 7 Ultimate 64 on the other virtual machine (VM2) with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (or R2) as well as to hold the session state.

On VM1 I am going to use two of my OCZ SSD's (one mirrored onto the other) out of my development machine that have fast read times but slow write times since the with the Web App I am only looking for high reads when the program is loading.

The other Virtual Machine (VM2) will have 2 new 100GB OCZ Vertex 2 drives, again one mirrored onto the other (Raid 1) for the Database Server and Session State. Since the Vertex 2 Drives seem to have good IOPS, especially Random Writes, I hope to be fine with it. Since I am not using any striping, and am only mirroring, fault tolerance should be very easy to deal with. And since my U2 case allows for hot-swapping, if one fails, I should be able to just pop one out, and pop the other in hopefully.

With my development machine, I am expecting to put 3 OCZ Vertex 2 100GB in a RAID 0, leaving 10% of the partition to deal with TRIM. Any opinions on this?

Thanks

 

[zzz2496]

Looks good to me
I'd personally use a separate RAID array for the DB data, separating the DB server OS/app off the data and session/logs.

RAID 1 is MUCH better than RAID 0 IMHO. In server world, you don't want to have a disastrous failure, much different than in desktop world...

zzz2496

 

[jayhawker]

I expect to having separate Raid 1's for each virtual machine. I assume that in the BIOS I can setup two completely separate Raid 1's but haven't ever done it. Any thing I should konw.

On my desktip machine, willl I have problems running 3 SSD's in a Raid 0. How will I align them, or do they even need it?