Intel SSD x25-Extreme vs. OCZ Vertex 2 SATATII

[pparks1]

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.

Why are you going to use a desktop OS on the 2nd VM and then put SQL Server on it? Seems like it would be better to run Server 2008 R2 on that second machine and run SQL on that.

 

[jayhawker]

In that case, what would I be running on the 1st VM. I was thinking that I would want the Web App to run on VM1, and that would require Windows Web Server 2008 R2, and that I would want my SQL Server on a different VM. I could use another Windows Web Server 2008 R2 on it as well, but I think I am just throwing money away in doing so. I could use Windows XP 64, but feel the small amount of extra expense to use Windows 7 ultimate 64 would be worth it.

If I am doing something wrong in what I am expecting please do point it out.

Thanks

 

[zzz2496]

*shakes head...*

Microsoft software stack is very expensive, huh? I mean, the whole stack is just ridiculously expensive, the hardware must have quite a bit more (especially RAM), the software licenses, not to mention the development tools, it's expensive at every level for little to no superiority to Open Source software stack.

If I were you, I'd just go with Linux for all of my production systems - that is leaving the whole MS software stack, that is if you can port/migrate your current solution to Linux. Linux's file system is close to indestructible, the applications (apache, postgesql, etc) uses very low system resources, leaving the resources to your app processing, not the OS. The manageability aspect, it's second to none, I can even say - too much options... It's just that good... But each to their own, my current solution loves apache/php/postgresql a lot, so I don't have anything to say. Good luck with your server setup, though...

zzz2496

 

[pparks1]

. I was thinking that I would want the Web App to run on VM1, and that would require Windows Web Server 2008 R2

The Web Server Edition of Windows is a more streamlined and friendlier priced OS for delivering web apps. There are limitations with regards to what else you could do with the product if you chose to do so. There is nothing stopping you from using a Windows 2008 R2 standard version of the software either and running a website from that. It's just more costly.

could use another Windows Web Server 2008 R2 on it as well, but I think I am just throwing money away in doing so.

If i were going to run a SQL Server, it wouldn't likely be on the web edition of the OS...but rather the standard edition of the OS.

As far as cost goes...the cost of the OS is going to be small in comparison to the hardware and moreso SQL server. Have you looked into the pricing for running SQL Server yet???? Since you are going to run a web app for an unlimited number of Internet hits, you need a version that is licensed at the processor level rather than at a CAL (client access level). If memory serves me correctly, this is going to be around $6,000 for that license.

If I were you, I would strongly be looking at a hosting provider that can supply these licenses to you under an SPLA agreement and charge you a monthly fee for usage.

 

[zzz2496]

. I was thinking that I would want the Web App to run on VM1, and that would require Windows Web Server 2008 R2

The Web Server Edition of Windows is a more streamlined and friendlier priced OS for delivering web apps. There are limitations with regards to what else you could do with the product if you chose to do so. There is nothing stopping you from using a Windows 2008 R2 standard version of the software either and running a website from that. It's just more costly.

could use another Windows Web Server 2008 R2 on it as well, but I think I am just throwing money away in doing so.

If i were going to run a SQL Server, it wouldn't likely be on the web edition of the OS...but rather the standard edition of the OS.

As far as cost goes...the cost of the OS is going to be small in comparison to the hardware and moreso SQL server. Have you looked into the pricing for running SQL Server yet???? Since you are going to run a web app for an unlimited number of Internet hits, you need a version that is licensed at the processor level rather than at a CAL (client access level). If memory serves me correctly, this is going to be around $6,000 for that license.

If I were you, I would strongly be looking at a hosting provider that can supply these licenses to you under an SPLA agreement and charge you a monthly fee for usage.

That is darn expensive...

zzz2496

 

[Thorsen]

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).
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Thanks for the reply

The SSD's dont consume less power than regular HHD's. The power consumption thing was disproven: The SSD Power Consumption Hoax : Flash SSDs Don?t Improve Your Notebook Battery Runtime ? they Reduce It

Tom's did a revision of the test for just the SSD: Flash SSD Update: More Results, Answers : An Apology First ? And One New SSD To Prove Us Right

Page 8: Test System and Power Measurements : Flash SSD Update: More Results, Answers
This test shows that one SSD actually did out perform:
"However, it’s the new OCZ Flash SSD that really shines. It provides 5-6x more performance per watt than the mechanical hard drives. That’s precisely what our initial article should have said: most of the Flash SSDs just aren’t that much better — until now, as shown by OCZ."

 

[zzz2496]

Thorsen, in an interactive system, like ours desktop systems, every bit of improvement we can "feel" it. But in a server system, where the data access behavior is FAR different than ours, it will most likely you won't even feel the difference. You don't stand there to look at the performance data, it happens way too fast for us users to "feel".

Here's the logic, at any given time, when a web page is requested, you query the database server for some content. The query it self will run at most around 50-500ms, that with all data returned. The web server it self with all iteration will most likely cost around 50-200ms to generate the page, add the transfer time, you get around a sec... let's say the server is hit with 7200 requests per second, that is 2 request each second (that's alot of requests), if 70% of those requests are "static" pages, then the SQL server will most likely cache the result so that it won't query it the second time, the web server also does some caching of it self, will also reduce the amount of time to query... It's not that "heavy" in a sense - this example contains 25.920.000 hits per hour, way above an average web server... If the OP's hits projection is around 5000-7000 hits per hour, the hardware + OS overhead way above the processing cost it self... My own running app, an internal portal with ~10k hits per hour cannot even scratch the power of IBM X3650 dual quad Xeon with 1GB of memory (4GB available, 1GB assigned to the guest OS). 90++% of the time, the whole thing is sitting idle... That's 10k hits per hour... That's 1 processing every 21.6 seconds...

It'll be different if you're talking about a database server that's around 1M hits per hour with database size more than 6GB, that'll need some serious processing power + speedy storage system (watch the emphasis of : storage system). Or maybe in a cluster of Database servers with more than 5M hits with database size of more than 10GB. In this kind of workload, you don't want to rely on just a RAID 1 or RAID 10, most of the time you'd want RAID 50 or RAID 60 with several hot spares on a several SAN servers. The data is much more valuable than the hardware. Looking at these configurations, using SSD is still waaaaaaayyyy too expensive, even for corporations... Unless the SSD's price can match the price of similarly sized SAS/FC HDD.

zzz2496.

 

[Thorsen]

I agree zzz2496. I work with DB's and Citrix environments. Most stuff is local, but I wouldn't expect using SSD's for this.

Quote by Jayhawker "actually several reasons, and not all have to do with performance"

Since the OP was requesting info on this, I figured I would post it.
(I could have added a disclaimer that little-to-no performance gain would be seen, but it had already been stated in others posts.)


On the topic of how the servers and all work: I like your break-down of each type and its general speeds. thats good info. I know thats acurate as ------ hmmm work related stuff....--------------


All in all....I wasn't suggesting using SSD's lol, moreso which one you would want if you were going to go that route. The report from Tom's hardware originally claimed that SSD's use more power than spinning HDD's, but that was destroyed when the tested OCZ Sata II out-performed everything else. Side note: I want one but they are expensive OCZ CORE SERIES SATA II 2.5" SSD 128GB Solid State Drive | PowerMax

 

[pparks1]

Power savings on hard drives is simply miniscule compared to the other high draw components in a system (CPU and GPU). I've always felt the same way about performance drives versus green drives. With the "very small" difference, if performance matters, it just doesn't pan out. I mean, if performance increases 10% on a non-green drive and you can finish your tasks 10% faster and shut down your machine 10% sooner, you save 100% of your total machines power over that 10% period of time which far and away would exceed the power differences saved between performance and green drives.

I could understand if regular drives took 200 watts and a green drive took 30. But it's simply nowhere near that dramatic.

In all of the servers that I have ever worked with, I haven't been inclined to go the SSD route in any of them. 10k and 15k sas spindles on a quality RAID controller have provided more than enough for my needs.

 

[Thorsen]

pparks1,

Well, I haven't worked with maintaining Hardware for servers, so Im out of my league on this one. I work with DB's and know lots of general computer stuff, but you and zzz2496 definitely have more experience than I.

 

[zzz2496]

Anyway, the speed of SSD isn't worth it's price in the enterprise class storage for now. I'd invest on a well made, well supported server system than invest my time to build one. As far as SSD concern, I personally will NOT advertise SSD for production/mission critical servers just yet, the risk is just too great.

zzz2496

 

[jayhawker]

I really do appreciate all the input. I am kind of stuck now going with what I have already ordered, but it looks like in the worst case I will have overkill which doesn’t bother me that much. I really don’t want to have to touch this system for a very long time.

As for my decision to go ahead with the SSD’s, I am not exactly sure what to come away with from the forum, whether or not they do use less power or not, but if my own experience with them is accurate then they do use less power.

My old development machine had 2 of the ATI 3870’s, 4GB ram, and 6 150 GB (RAID 0) raptors in it. I was having problems keeping it up and running with a 750 Watt Power supply, and I went to a 1000 Watt to solve the problem. It was also very hot and the fans ran fast to keep it cool. My latest development machine, in exactly the same case with the same fans has 6GB Ram, 3 ATI 5870’s, and 4 of the OCZ vertex 60GB SSD’s. I was so anxious to get it up and running that I grabbed an old 550 Watt power supply and stuck it in my machine. It has been running for 6 months flawlessly. Of course I am using less drives (4 vs. 6), but I am also using more memory and 3 graphics cards instead of 2. I haven’t gone about it as scientific as I probably could have, but I can barely even hear my machine with the SSD’s running, and unless there was something wrong with my 750 Watt powers supply (it was either a corsair or OCZ) it is definitely using less power. Of course the SSD’s make no noise, but the fans to cool down the case are barely spinning now. I did not have the latest raptors (veliraptor’s) but understand them to be much more efficient.

As for going with Microsoft (instead of Lamp), this particular Web App is for financial services and most financial IT shops still want to see Microsoft products, Microsoft SQL Server instead of MySQL and Windows Operating Systems. It is naive of them, but marketing by Microsoft pays off. I have several Web App's running on Linux, and they run flawlessly. I even run our asterisk based phone system off of Lamp, and I just looked and it and the uptime has been 4 years. I think that is pretty incredible.

As for this particular Web App, the files can be large, and so I wanted to make sure that my hardware did not become the bottleneck in performance.

I did choose the OCZ vertex 2 SSD's over the Intel SSD's. Just couldn't justify the difference in price to go with the Intel’s though they are probably better. I worked at Intel 25 years ago (an EE) and actually remember touching on this technology anticipating it to be where it is today sometime. It would surprise me greatly that any company has as much background and knowledge about SSD’s as Intel does, but again I chose OCZ to save money. I will probably run them in a RAID 5 as I grow the system over time, but chose just to mirror one drive onto the other for each of my Virtual machines for now.

I had 4 of the original OCZ Vertex 60 GB (RAID 0) in my development machine, and they were lightning fast with reads (max 568.7MB/s, avg 388.89MB/s, random access time 50 MICRO seconds... according to Sandra), but slow in writing. So I am putting two of them in the U2 Server, and 2 of them in my 5 year old Quasmio Laptop. For the server, I will have one mirrored onto the other for VM1, with Windows Web Server 2008 R2 and the Web Apps on it. I am doing that because I expect in the end to have the Web App loaded in Ram and the session state on a different Virtual Machine so there should be very little writing to the SSD.

I have purchased 2 OCZ Vertex 2 drives for VM2, with fast reads/writes, and will have one mirrored onto the other. It will have Windows 7 Ultimate 64 and SQL Server 2008 Web R2 (one processor license) and it will be where I store the Session State as well.

I expect to have both VM’s using different Raid’s for performance. Hopefully this will all work well.

Thanks for all the input. As I get the system up and running, I will probably be back with some more questions!

 

[zzz2496]

Once you have the server running, capture performance data if you can... I'd like to know the performance of an SSD in a production server (If you're willing to share, that is...).

Btw, don't mistake Linux software stack with LAMP, I don't use the "M" portion... I do use Linux, Apache, and PHP, but for database, I use PostgreSQL (Yahoo, BASF, and several other HUGE companies use PostgreSQL, though they custom taylor it for their needs). AFAIK, this is the one of the best DB server out there, both free and paid... For beginners, LAMP is very easy to get traction, but for enterprise, it can be a bit daunting, but BY FAR is much more superior than what Microsoft has to offer... As for financial services, I personally don't believe in MS SQL server. For a large cluster deployment, I'd go with Oracle on Linux - as you said, the uptime of a Linux server is down right incredible, I don't put any of my mission critical systems on top Windows. The backend servers can use many exotic systems, the front end is mostly Windows. Anyway, it's good to know you've made your choice, let us know if there's anything you need help with...Good luck

zzz2496