Considering a Xeon-D 1540 for ZFS vs. IvyBridge-EP E5

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clayton006

[H]ard|Gawd
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So I have a question. I have an ASRock Extreme 11 motherboard lying around. It was an expensive board new ($600) because of the 8-port LSI raid controller (using 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes) and two PLX switches. I was contemplating buying an E5-2630v2 and some DDR3 ECC Ram and using this as the system for the basis of my ZFS box. I would only start out with 8 drives anyway so I could skip buying an HBA. BUT I'd have to buy an Intel NIC.

--OR--

I could buy an XeonD-1540 (the one with 10GB E, as I want to get there eventually) and like the above have 64GB ram (though DDR4 with this system). I believe this system would perform well for ZFS with iSCSI? I know it will consume far less power.

In either configuration I would need to buy a power supply, case, and storage. In the above config I would need a CPU and the lower system I would not.

I'm on the fence about which way I should go for my first ZFS system.
 
Either would work. From what you've said I think an E5 would be overkill so I would be tempted to try the Xeon D. I considered getting one but in the end I got something else second hand. It's more of a long-term investment with the low power savings and 10GbE may be useful at some point.
 
Xeon-D is very new, sometimes too new.
Do not expect support in any OS. Check HCL and user comments.

If you want to be open to any OS, use a mainboard with onboard Intel X540 for 10G
(check Asrock and SuperMicro server mainboards)
 
What would you be using this ZFS pool for? Business or pleasure? I'm running ZFS on dual L5335 (low voltage, 8 cores between 2 CPU) that are 10 years old and they have zero problem for basic data serving. That's on a 10 disc pool.

If this is just basic data storage in your home, you do not need much.
 
If all you are doing is storage, both systems are going to be over kill. Those Xeon D platforms are very awesome though. If you want specific based system Intel released new versions of the 1540, I suggest looking them up.
 
_Gea said:
Xeon-D is very new, sometimes too new.
Do not expect support in any OS. Check HCL and user comments.
Click to expand...
Broadwell support has been coming along in the Linux kernel since around 3.13. As of Fedora 22 (kernel 4.0) Broadwell runs fine.

Hardware support is one of the weaknesses of the Illumos based distros...
 
The Xeon-D may end up hosting some mechanical storage so I may need more processing power (and a separate system) for that. Optionally I may want to have two ZFS boxes for two different storage tiers. The first box will be for media storage and other long term mechanical storage. That most likely would be the Xeon-D. The other system would host PCI-E based SSD storage (most likely Intel 750's) for a Tier-0 type storage for VMs and other performance based tasks. This Tier-0 would have to be on a 10gb network.

I apologize for taking so long to respond.
 
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I use a 1540D with OmniOS and ESXi 6. There is full support and it is now perfectly stable. There were some rare issues with the 1.0a bios but that has been fixed with 1.0b.

The only thing I will say is that it does not support SR-IOV so if you need that wait until 1541 which should be released in February. Other than that it's an awesome rig!
 
davewolfs said:
I use a 1540D with OmniOS and ESXi 6. There is full support and it is now perfectly stable. There were some rare issues with the 1.0a bios but that has been fixed with 1.0b.

The only thing I will say is that it does not support SR-IOV so if you need that wait until 1541 which should be released in February. Other than that it's an awesome rig!
Click to expand...

Good to know. I may upgrade my AV system first in the house and then go for my ZFS project. That may be perfect timing.
 
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