Storage Spaces - Auto Tiering

[leadeater]

So I decided to backup all my data and do some testing with Storage Spaces and auto tiering. I was expecting it to work well but it certainly did better than I was expecting.

 

System Specs:

IBM x3500 M4

Intel E5-2620

128GB RAM

Intel X540-T2 10Gb

LSI 9361-8i - 4x IBM 300GB 10K RAID 5 1GB cache, 3x ST3000NM0033 RAID 5 1GB cache

IBM M1115 - 2x Samsung 840 Pro 512GB JBOD, 4x Samsung 850 Pro 512GB JBOD

 

Storage VM:

2 vCPU

4GB RAM

IBM M1115 Passthrough

6x 700GB VMDK (Dirty hack)

 

Storage Pool:

6x 512GB SSD

6x 700GB HDD

 

Virtual Disk:

Mirror

3 Columns

2 Copies

3.44TB Total

1.39TB SSD

2.05 HDD

 

Couple of reasons why I used virtual disks for the HDD tier:

• Couldn't pass through LSI card to VM, need base datastore for storage VM (Have an IBM M5110 so could in future)
• Wanted 6 disks for 3 columns

What surprised me was just how damn fast it performs locally, iSCSI target, SMB share etc. Everything I threw at it went like a rocket, even using it as an iSCSI ESXi datastore which is actually the original purpose. I was intending to benchmark it against FreeNAS but just can't be bothered. FreeNAS will likely be faster in the small block I/O due to ram caching and also has VAAI support so is actually superior for my use case, but I'm a heavy Windows slave

 

 

 

Edit: Added 10QD ATTO