SSD for File Server Questions

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Shumph

Limp Gawd
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Nov 29, 2004
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I have a file server for my company that serves (at this point) about 8-10GB worth of data to about 12 users. This data mainly consists of word docs and pdf files but also contains tiff or other image files. I also have a sort of document management system that "catalogs" these files in a sql database that is about 250mb. Lately due to additions to staff the server "feels" slow. It is just old and due for an update so new server is being speced.

I was wondering if SSD would be a good fit for this scenario. Would we see a major difference in speed? Are SSD ok in multi user environments? What would be the brands to buy and what to avoid? Also same question with regards to controller. I plan to also hang a raid 6 or 10 system off of this server also for B/U storage (workstations and 2nd server) and that will be moved to tape.

I have been trying to educate myself on this stuff but my head is going to explode. So I thought I would just ask the question straight out. Thanks.
 
Depends on where the bottleneck is. When you say it "feels" slow, what activity is occurring that makes you say it is feeling slower? The file server that's serving up the data, what are the specs on that?
Is the SQL database/server the same machine as the file server? Is it on the same disk(s) as the other data?
 
The old server was purchased when the office had only 2 people. It has low ram and a slow (5400?) single disk. I realize that any new server is going to be faster, I was just wondering if the ssd's made sense here.
 
Shumph said:
The old server was purchased when the office had only 2 people. It has low ram and a slow (5400?) single disk. I realize that any new server is going to be faster, I was just wondering if the ssd's made sense here.
Click to expand...

Given the low data size, two Intel 40GB SSDs in a mirror would be a nice setup.
Otherwise, two 640GB WD drives in a mirror will do fine.
 
spectrumbx said:
Given the low data size, two Intel 40GB SSDs in a mirror would be a nice setup.
Otherwise, two 640GB WD drives in a mirror will do fine.
Click to expand...

If you are doing this in an office environment, I would strongly suggest two X25-M 80GB over X25-V's. A $200 differential for double the storage capacity, plus a lot better performance is not a lot if you start figuring a few seconds per day per employee, even with only 10 employees, over a 2-3 year lifespan of the drives. Using 250 workday years, 2 year lifespan (being conservative) and 10 employees you have 5,000 FTE/days of usage (assuming average of 10 users). For every 10 seconds you save, per day, per user, you save 13.66/ hours of time over the hardware's lifespan. If the average wage in that case is $14.65 or higher (fully loaded) then you have a positive business case for spending the extra $200 for the X25-M versus the X25-V's.
 
budget info is manditory for any recommendations to take place.

do you have a clear budget from a manager on this project?

before running to SSD as a fix-all consider the system, network, applications, etc.

What OS is running on the host in question, what specific hardware is it running.

If you're budget approves going for a more conventional server then outfitting it with SAS 15K drives in RAID10 might be great for the data. Again, I have no way of knowing what works for you because of budget and requirements.

In any file serve scenario iops reign supreme. Take a remote iometer and bandwidth reading of your system and post some numbers.

http://openmaniak.com/iperf.php
http://www.iometer.org/
 
what software are you using to catalog it?

our servers we sell clients are usually sata or sas in raid 1 or raid 5. doing alot of SAS lately do the size.
 
Server will be new and I am just starting to spec it out now. Budget is what I say it is (I am final approval) but I want to keep it under 4k and preferably under 3k. OS will be 2008R2. The software that is the "doc management" is called Time Matters. It uses sql server as the back end but really only puts the metadata in the DB and the files are served by the OS. There will also be software called Case Notebook that acts in a similar fashion. Network is all new cat 6 with new gig switches (we are in the process of upgrading everything).

Right now the (old) server has about 500GB of data on it. The most important data is under 10gb and consists of word docs and pdf's. Due to the nature of what we do the same set of docs might get accessed multiple times a day by all the users (reads and writes). Docs are under 10mb and most are under 3mb so they are not very big, I just want to make sure the network is as fast as can be (I have a vested interest in our success)
 
with that much data SAS is really out. Go with SATA should be a good upgrade, if you can afford SAS would be nice.

I'd get a nice PowerEdge T610 and SBS 08, that is what we are proposing for the Time Matters clients, TM is suppose to be nice with Exchange and Phone support
 
marley1 said:
with that much data SAS is really out. Go with SATA should be a good upgrade, if you can afford SAS would be nice.

I'd get a nice PowerEdge T610 and SBS 08, that is what we are proposing for the Time Matters clients, TM is suppose to be nice with Exchange and Phone support
Click to expand...

I got TM to play nicely with my asterisk based phone system (one click dialing) but I cannot get the exchange sync to work. I think it is because I use exchange 2010. Thanks for the suggestions.
 
SSDs would be a pretty sweet upgrade to that office!

I'd also take a look at the workgroup's switch if your going to throwing a brand new server at them, making sure it has a gig backbone to the new server, etc..
 
SSD shouldn't be a consideration for the data portion of this system.

If you're looking to get into a 3-4k range of servers check this out:

Dell PowerEdge R710
Chassis for Up to Eight 2.5-Inch Hard Drives
Intel® Xeon® X5550, 2.66Ghz, 8M Cache,Turbo, HT, 1333MHz Max Mem
Dual Ranked UDIMM
6GB Memory (3x2GB), 1333MHz Dual Ranked UDIMMs for 1 Processor, Optimized
RAID 1/RAID 10 for H700 or PERC 6/i Controllers
4x500GB 7.2K RPM SATA 3.5" Hot Plug Hard Drive (RAID 10 - Data)
2x160GB 7.2K RPM SATA 3.5" Hot Plug Hard Drive (RAID 1 - OS)
Energy Smart Power Supply, Redundant, 570W
Intel® Gigabit ET NIC, Dual Port, Copper, PCIe-4 (Use NIC Teaming to bond)

$3,226.00

This does not include OS or licensing for SQL.

You can play with the hard drive/processor as required. Don't go the route of a tower, it is a waste of time and since you have a vested interest (i.e. career on the line) then you should be sure that redundancy plays a key role in your design.

The difference between SATA and SAS is night and day, if there is a bottleneck to this system it will be the SATA drives but I don't think your budget is going to cover the expense. SAS can simultaneously read/write while SATA can only do one operation at a time.
 
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