I am not aware of any solution that exists within Dell's hardware scope for such big caches and hope Dell staff can suggest it since I am very interested as well.
However, what people in my company use is bcache on 1TB NVMe disks attached to the PCIe slots, which is a robust and efficient solution independent of hardware manufacturers. It permits creating write caches for any kind of disk/array configurations, with a lot of tuning options (writeback amount, other caching modes, etc)
bcache is only available in all major Linux distributions, but there is a similar solution for Windows called Intel Smart Response, on which I can't provide any feedback due to lack of experience.
Well yes, you're correct, H710P is able to do CacheCade but it's only read cache only unfortunately. I can't think of any way to add write cache for your server at the moment. Probably you can try suggestion by aryzen.
I don't have the access to the design engineering, I couldn't get an answer for your question on it. Though in the article, it's on specific LSI IO controller model, for H710P it's using a LSI 2008 chipset. And I'm unsure if it's more to hardware controls or it's a software control mentioned in the article: LSI MegaRAID CacheCade Pro 2.0.
aryzen
15 Posts
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September 29th, 2020 20:00
I am not aware of any solution that exists within Dell's hardware scope for such big caches and hope Dell staff can suggest it since I am very interested as well.
However, what people in my company use is bcache on 1TB NVMe disks attached to the PCIe slots, which is a robust and efficient solution independent of hardware manufacturers. It permits creating write caches for any kind of disk/array configurations, with a lot of tuning options (writeback amount, other caching modes, etc)
bcache is only available in all major Linux distributions, but there is a similar solution for Windows called Intel Smart Response, on which I can't provide any feedback due to lack of experience.
DELL-Joey C
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4.1K Posts
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September 29th, 2020 23:00
Hi @lanman9000,
Well yes, you're correct, H710P is able to do CacheCade but it's only read cache only unfortunately. I can't think of any way to add write cache for your server at the moment. Probably you can try suggestion by aryzen.
lanman9000
1 Rookie
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21 Posts
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September 29th, 2020 23:00
The Server is running VMWare ESXI 6.7 U3.
I need something that can work at the hardware layer (or be supported natively in esxi)
Also, I don't understand CacheCade being read only cache. According to LSI using cachecade for writecache has been available since 2011.
https://searchitchannel.techtarget.com/news/2240039368/LSI-MegaRAID-CacheCade-gets-write-caching-capability
How has this functionality not made it into the dell firmware?
DELL-Joey C
Moderator
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4.1K Posts
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September 30th, 2020 02:00
Hi,
I don't have the access to the design engineering, I couldn't get an answer for your question on it. Though in the article, it's on specific LSI IO controller model, for H710P it's using a LSI 2008 chipset. And I'm unsure if it's more to hardware controls or it's a software control mentioned in the article: LSI MegaRAID CacheCade Pro 2.0.
I tried googling, and I got this: https://dell.to/3cJNuQn
Let me know your thoughts.