[OpenIndiana-discuss] dell r730xd + SATA

[jason matthews]

On 4/28/17 3:25 PM, Nikola M wrote:

OMG. Again, I am aware of conventional wisdom and have provided the same 
information to others.


> On 04/28/17 11:57 PM, Nikola M wrote:
>>> I have a number of R730s working with the 2x expanders and Intel DC
>>> S37{0,1}0 SSDs. It is time to order again and the 24 bay 730XD is a
>>> seductress in terms of storage options. I just dont know if it will
>>> work well mixing expanders and SATA.
>> No it won't.
I am not going argue with you over conventional wisdom. I am interested 
in recent experiences.

However, to address your concerns. It is basically the Joyent spec but 
with Intel DC S3710 drives instead of the SAS drives they use.

In the existing case, the R730 has 2x expansion and those run day in and 
day out with a write heavy load into OLTP in one group of servers. 
Writes per second routinely run between 15-50k and spike even higher - 
day in and day out for going past three years now. Another group of 
servers that run batch OLTP jobs sustain 100k r/s. I am not going on my 
fourth year with R730s with no mid-plane problems to report, so now I 
want to know about the 3x expansion midplane.

>> It might look ok, or you could seem happy, but at the first
>> sign of trouble or reporting some bug, you could learn the hard way,
>> that is not supported configuration to use SATA drives with SAS
>> expanders.
Yes, I am aware of all of this. This is not my question.

>> And avoid configuration with the expanders at all, but do
>> direct connecting drives to the controller ports).
>>
>> Btw, internet is full with expander warnings, hope this helps.
I wrote some of those warnings on this list. Again, this is not the 
question I am asking.

>> /Aug 30, 2010: Update: At a significant account, I can say that we
>> (meaning Nexenta) have verified that SAS/SATA expanders combined with
>> high loads of ZFS activity have proven conclusively to be highly
>> toxic. So, if you're designing an enterprise storage solution,
>> *please* consider using SAS all the way to the disk drives, and just
>> skip those cheaper SATA options. You may think SATA looks like a
>> bargain, but when your array goes offline during ZFS scrub or resilver
>> operations because the expander is choking on cache sync commands,
>> you'll really wish you had spent the extra cash up front. Really./

I am not sure if you have noticed, but technology can change a lot in 
seven years. I am looking for recent real life experiences. BTW, we 
scrub on the 4th day of the month and have never had a problem.

I going to have dell ship me some eval r730xds  and we test the crap out 
of them.


thanks for answer any way.

j.