Can I have SSD drives in NL nodes?

No, you can't add SSD drives for NL nodes, Isilon NL-Series it's recommended for backup, archiving and near line solutions.

The question I would have is why would you want to place SSD's in an NL node?

But currently you can't add SSD's into NL nodes and I can't see this changing anytime soon due to the reason the NL node is there and thats for capacity and archive and not performance.

"Why?"

With a massive number of small files on NL nodes,  even a classic archive can show

unsatisfying behaviour with respect to execution times of:

- restripes after disk failure/replacement or capacity extension (most critical aspect here)

- SmartPools operation (if the NL pool is part of a larger cluster)

- replication or backup

- client treewalks for archive indexing, or accessing multi-file data sets.

Having experienced the benefit of GNA to metadata operations on NL,

I'd be quite open to seeing SSD in NL nodes natively.

"Wether?"

I have actually seen a price list with SSD available on/for NL nodes,

so I wonder wether it requires explicit approval but is technically possible?

Cheers

-- Peter

Hi Peter,

At the moment there are no SSD's in the NL nodes, if you need to add performance into an NL node cluster you can add Performance Accelerators purely to give a performance boost to the Cluster.  Thats the beauty of the Isilon product being able to add performance or capacity or a mixture of both using different node types.

As for the price list, I haven't seen anything internally about adding SSD into NL nodes.

Cheers

Dominic

Hi Dominic,

my point was that various metadata operations can be crucial even

in lean and mean archive scenarios; I was not talking about

throughput performance in general (usually not considered archive).

I'm going to stay optimistic though maybe these offers are only for certain customers(?),

or I interpret the descriptions wrong.

820‐0033            FIELD UPGRADE KIT; X/NL400 1 X 400GB  SSD

820‐0034            FIELD UPGRADE KIT; X/NL400 2 X 400GB  SSD

820‐0035            FIELD UPGRADE KIT; X/NL400 3 X 400GB  SSD

820‐0036            FIELD UPGRADE KIT; X/NL400 4 X 400GB  SSD

NL400‐SAT‐S01  NL400‐120T+2.4T SSD/12G/4x1GE

NL400‐SAT‐S02  NL400‐120T+2.4T SSD/12G/2x10GE SFP+2x1GE

NL400‐SAT‐S03  NL400‐120T+2.4T SSD/24G/4x1GE

NL400‐SAT‐S04  NL400‐120T+2.4T SSD/24G/2x10GE SFP+2x1GE

NL400‐SAT‐S05  NL400‐120T+2.4T SSD/48G/4x1GE

NL400‐SAT‐S06  NL400‐120T+2.4T SSD/48G/2x10GE SFP+2x1GE

Cheers

-- Peter

There is a need for archiving workflowswith extremely large numbers of files.  NL400 with SSD's address the latency issues.

It is physically possible to put SSD drives in an NL400 chassis.

If enough sales opportunities present themselves, it could come from the factory with SSD's  (wink wink).

Cheers,
Matt

I fully agree with Peter.

Archive does not mean that FSA never ends (I am talking weeks for a single FSA run)

Archive does not mean that FlexProtect should run 6 days

Archive does not mean that SmartPools take 2 weeks

These are all internal management operations that are required just for normal operations and sometimes simply put the cluster at risk.

Most archive use cases involve billions of small files and I have heard support say never build a cluster with over 1-2 Billion files just because it becomes unstable.

SSDs are critical for these cases. You can still keep the CPU and RAM profile low to limit client performance.

One further comment, the 2% rule is a guideline, based on empirical evidence.  The required minimum SSD capacity is 1.5% for OneFS 7.X releases, and 0.5% for OneFS 6.5.X releases.

Actually 2% is the theoretical maximum of SSD:HDD when using tiny files:

for one tiny (8KB) file we have:

SSD: 1 x 512B

HDD: 3 x 8KB (data) + 3 x 512B (metadata)

=> ratio 0.5KB : 25.5KB = 0.0196 = 2%

With huge files the ratio goes well below 0.1%,

so the 0.5% or 1.5%  have very comfortable safety margins.

-- Peter