Reviews - Intel Hammer 24-bay storage server

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Powered by 24 Intel DC S3700 800GB SSDs!

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[andykillen]

just can't quite justify this for my house, but I really want to.

Would have been interesting to see the RAID5/6/10/50 configuration performance, but it seems that time was not permitting on this occasion. Of course I would also like to see what this does when hooked up to an apple based system for video editing, or a *nix system as a db...

[jimbouk]

just can't quite justify this for my house, but I really want to.

Can't quite justify £45,000 on a computer for you're house?!? That's half the value of my house!

[Moby-Dick]

I'd rather have a whiptail

[Kushan]

Typo on the first page, says Server 2008 RC2 instead of R2.

Shame more tests weren't done with this, really, it does seem like a silly amount of performance.

[kingpotnoodle]

I'd take a guess 300,000 IOPS is limited by the RAID cards and system rather than the drives - as with many things 24x drives is never going to be anywhere near 24x the performance, much is lost in the RAID processing overheads. RAID 0 was a totally useless configuration to test when the underlying disks are so fast and it's interface to the world is only 4x 1Gb NICs (i.e. 500MB/s - a couple of SSDs could saturate that nevermind 24 of them). Almost nobody would actually seriously use the array in that configuration...

I'd be tempted to configure a RAID 50/60 if supported with 2-4 hot spares, would be nice to have seen the performance of that. Whereas in a 24 disk array with spinning disks I'd have to use 600-900GB 10/15K disks in RAID 10 to get higher performance I might be able to use 400GB SSDs in a RAID 50 and still get better performance with closer drive prices.

24x 600GB RAID 10 excluding 2 hotspares = ~6.6TB usable (600GB 15K drives are ~£300 each)
24x 400GB RAID 50 excluding 4 hotspares = ~7.2TB usable (~£775 each for SC700 400GB)

So 2.5x the cost per drive rather than 5x (for the 800GB) creates similar capacity and probably still much faster and maybe even still controller/NIC limited - which would have been a great test to run.

However performance aside this unit isn't really enterprise grade in my opinion, not for any critical front-line "live" role anyway (e.g. VMWare shared storage), it's very disappointing to see the OS drive is a single point of failure and non-hotswap as well is unforgivable. A proper SAN like an Equalogic or HP Px000 is in the same price range and has redundant hot-swap controllers, more network interfaces (maybe 10Gb) and a tightly focussed embedded OS rather than Windows.

[Moby-Dick]

Many might Argue that an Equalogic isnt a proper SAN ( though they usually work for the Compellant side of Dell ) What would mitigate things more would be the ability to use the storage in a shared mode with another Server 2012 box & storage spaces. Its the only way I'd be happy with windows at my primary storage OS.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Hammer Time!!

[kingpotnoodle]

Many might Argue that an Equalogic isnt a proper SAN ( though they usually work for the Compellant side of Dell ) What would mitigate things more would be the ability to use the storage in a shared mode with another Server 2012 box & storage spaces. Its the only way I'd be happy with windows at my primary storage OS.

Well maybe but an Equalogic decked out with SSDs would be in the same ball park price range though hence the comparison, I'd certainly rather have an Equalogic than this Hammer thing in whatever config was the same cost.

[Moby-Dick]

True - though I'm not seeing any reference to wear levelling or any other SSD optimisations for either !

[Roobubba]

"Boss, we have 45000 to spend before year-end when the budget is taken away. I have an idea. Go ahead?"

[IvanValencia]

Can it run mine sweper?

[DanceswithUnix]

However performance aside this unit isn't really enterprise grade in my opinion, not for any critical front-line "live" role anyway (e.g. VMWare shared storage), it's very disappointing to see the OS drive is a single point of failure and non-hotswap as well is unforgivable. A proper SAN like an Equalogic or HP Px000 is in the same price range and has redundant hot-swap controllers, more network interfaces (maybe 10Gb) and a tightly focussed embedded OS rather than Windows.

Single OS drive is the least of its problems. Looks like if you lose a raid controller, the other one can't take over that storage. If you lose the server, I can't see how another server in a cluster can take over the storage.

So yeah, interesting toy, but not enterprise grade.

[Mark wu]

hello . i am Mark wu. it is a pleasure to be in this group.

[shaithis]

Nice and all but I'd rather buy a much cheaper Equalogic hybrid or roll my own. Still not completely sold on full SSD SANs and their worth (and their implementation in some cases).