SAN with a few SSD drives, or lots of old fashioned HDDs

hpssdstorage-area-network

My company is trying to figure out what type of SAN to purchase. This is specifically for database servers that are becoming IO constrained (storage is DAS right now, but we're hitting the limit of a single server and we'd like to add clustering as well).

We need a solution that will produce around 3000 IOPS long-term (we currently peak around 1000 IOPS). Most of our database operations are small reads/writes. Based on discussions with HP engineers and others online, an HP P2000 with 24 SAS HD's in a RAID 10 configuration will deliver just short of that speed for ~$20K. Add in controllers and other items to build out the SAN puts us right around our max budget of $30K.

But online, I see that many SAS SSD's deliver speeds of 80,000 IOPS+. Is this realistic to expect? If so, would it be realistic to get a P2000 or similar entry level SAN and throw a few SSD's in there? Our databases are small, only a couple TB total. If we did this, we'd have the money leftover to buy a second SAN for mirroring/failover, which seems prudent.

Best Answer

I can speak on the specifics of what you're trying to accomplish. Honestly, I would not consider an entry-level HP P2000/MSA2000 for your purpose.

These devices have many limitations and from a SAN feature-set perspective, are nothing more than a box of disks. No tiering, no intelligent caching, a maximum of 16 disks in a Virtual Disk group, low IOPS capabilities, poor SSD support, (especially on the unit you selected).

You would need to step up to the HP MSA2040 to see any performance benefit or official support with SSDs. Plus, do you really want to use iSCSI?

DAS may be your best option if you can tolerate local storage. PCIe flash storage will come in under your budget, but capacity will need to be planned carefully.

Can you elaborate on the specifications of your actual servers? Make/model, etc.

If clustering is a must-have, another option is to do the HP MSA2040 unit, but use a SAS unit instead of iSCSI. This is less costly than the other models, allows you to connect 4-8 servers, offers low-latency and great throughput, and can still support SSDs. Even with the Fibre or iSCSI models, this unit would give you more flexibility than the one you linked.