[Kevin OBrien]

At IDF last week Intel launched their new enterprise line of SSDs, the 710 Series. The SSD 710 is Intel's first enterprise SSD in quite a while, the previous generation X25-E has been in the market for nearly three years. Over that span of time, a lot has changed in the enterprise space and those changes are reflected in the SSD 710. The most noticeable being the move from SLC NAND in the X25-E to 25nm MLC NAND with high endurance technology in the SSD 710 to drive down price and increase capacity. Other more subtle changes have taken place as well, including firmware optimized for endurance and an option for IT managers to modify the amount of over provisioning on the drives.

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[Brian]

Over the next week we'll be pushing the 710's hard in RAID 0/1/5. If you have any special requests please post them here...

[NuTypeStorage]

 Brian, on 23 September 2011 - 02:15 PM, said:

Over the next week we'll be pushing the 710's hard in RAID 0/1/5. If you have any special requests please post them here...

I would be highly interested in database benchmarks (TPS or IOPS). I don't care which database server software. I find synthetic benchmarks to be a good indicator of "potential" performance but not indicative of real-world work scenarios.

My use case is this: I am looking to upgrade my SaaS environment from HDD to SSD. Currently my CPU's (4x Xeon E7 8870 @ 2.4Ghz- -80 theads) are at 12~15% load which obviously is NOT the bottleneck. RAM (1TB) and Network (10Gbit) are also not a factor. I bought 2 HP LeftHand P4300G2 SAN units with the fastest HDD's they offer. After finding that they were the bottleneck (poor IOPS), I threw together a ZFS SAN with several SSD's for caching (ZIL and L2ARC) and 10x 600GB 15k SAS (RAID 10) and I nearly tripled the number of concurrent users the SaaS system could use. Even with the ZFS SAN, the CPU usage is still around 20~45% at full load, so this means that disk is still the bottleneck. The IOPS on the ZFS tripled over the HP SAN so performance gains are predicable and linear. Ideally, I would LOVE to just shove nothing but SSD's into my SAN. Cost is an issue on testing this as I would have to invest in them and if they don't improve anything further, then it was a huge bust.

I am not saying that you would have to emulate my environment, but perhaps setting up a quad core based box with 8GB of RAM a few SSD's to test, install LAMP with Wordpress or Drupal and load test with JMeter or Apache's built in load testing tool that would be awesome for readers!

I would love to see those numbers vs. HDD numbers.

This post has been edited by NuTypeStorage: 23 September 2011 - 03:51 PM

[Darking]

I must admit that the performance does not meet with my expectations.

It does seem like the micron drive is a more modern and faster performing drive. Intel might have selected a bit too conservative approach
.