Here’s a chart from an LSI tech brief that shows how performance increases and latency decreases with the SSD caching layer: This hybrid blending of traditional HDDs with SSDs is can boost performance for some applications such as server visualization, video editing, and databases by upwards of 12x or more. If you haven’t heard of CacheCade it’s a hybrid SSD caching technology from LSI for the MegaRAID Series (9260/9280/9266/9286/9265/9285) RAID controllers that greatly accelerates the performance (IOPS) of SATA/SAS RAID arrays by layering in a SSD based read/write cache layer.
Hardware RAID is going to be around for some time to come but don’t look to it for great innovations, for that, keep your eye on the software side with technologies like ZFS and Ceph. That’s a great way to go and consolidates and simplifies the product line for Broadcom. With the 94xx series Broadcom is jumping into the NVMe space (connect 4x per card) which is great and these tri-mode cards can act as a HW RAID adapter, or HBA, or NVMe adapter all-in-one. SSD is cheap so why bother accelerating HDDs when one can build the whole array out of SSDs for not much more and much higher performance. HPE is the only hold-out with their own custom hardware RAID card but we see that too being phased out in the Gen10 servers for Adaptec derivative boards.Īs far as CacheCade is concerned, I think it’s usefulness has past. Today, if you have a Cisco, Intel, Dell, Fujitsu, or a SuperMicro server, they all use the OEM versions of the LSI MegaRAID or LSI HBA chips (3008) and we’re seeing LSI standardize on the storcli utility for both rather than maintaining separate CLIs. That means using a board with a LSI 3108 chip either in an OEM add-on card or via an add-on card. At OSNEXUS we still use hardware RAID1 to mirror together the boot drives. I’d been hoping to see things like bit-rot correction and smart drive rebuilds come to market but it’s still not there and probably isn’t coming.
Over the last 6 years we’ve seen LSI be acquired by Avago which was then acquired by Broadcom but unfortunately we’ve not seen many innovations in hardware RAID.
Hybrid SSD storage & LSI MegaRAID CacheCade Pro v2.0 Home › Storage Appliance Hardware › Hybrid SSD storage & LSI MegaRAID CacheCade Pro v2.0
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