Storage and Compute
Error Detection and Correction, EDAC, is a set of Linux kernel modules for handling hardware-related errors. Its major focus has been ECC memory error handling, however it also detects and reports PCI bus parity errors. This post on the ION Server Blog looks at how that fits on modern servers. Continue reading Linux EDAC modules on Server Systems
Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors V2 offer improved performance and in many cases more cores or higher speeds than their V1 predecessors at the same price point. On average, V2 Processors deliver 33% more performance than their V1 predecessors. Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors V2 also deliver greater memory address space ranging from 1TB to 4.5TB depending on model. Gold and Platinum series processors along with Continue reading Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors V2 now available in ion P-series Servers
ion has added a new option to its SR-71mach6 SpeedServer™ Configurator to allow the selection of Intel® Optane™ SSDs from the 905P Enthusiast series. Compared to Intel’s Optane DC P4800X series, this family continues to deliver an Uncorrectable Bit Error Rate (UBER) of 1 sector per 10^17 bits read but the endurance drops from an astounding 60 full drive writes per day to only Continue reading ion SR-71mach6 adds Enthusiast-series Optane™ drive options
SSDs in servers deliver performance, whether measured in IOPS or GBps or latency, that is just plain impossible with disks. SSD capacity is now greater than that of performance disks. Price is the factor that still keeps many organizations away from deploying servers with SSD storage when the improved performance is not a significant benefit. The better reliability of SSD might be more important. Continue reading SSD vs HDD RAID in Servers and Storage
Most “server” deployments deserve a rich, robust server platform with redundant power, redundant cooling, redundant storage, multiple network paths and error-correcting memory, but many servers already have redundant applications and redundant data. In some of these deployments it then becomes reasonable to consider a small, cool, low-power alternative approach with redundant storage and two network interfaces for redundant communications. ion calls that a miniSERVER. Continue reading ion miniSERVER
For years, ion has reported usable capacity of disk and SSD storage in GiB and TiB instead of GB and TB. Why? And what’s the difference? Basically, 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes while 1 GiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes. That is about 7%! Look at ion‘s SR-71mach6 SpeedServer or PS StorageServer for examples of capacity reporting. You can learn more about the differences in the Continue reading Storage Capacity: TB vs TiB
Servers based on Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, the proccesor architecture known as “Skylake”, have arrived! ion is producing 1U and 2U rackmount servers along with pedestal/4U servers and high density half-U compute nodes. These servers feature much improved capability for NVMe SSDs and significantly higher memory bandwidth, along with options for more cores and higher clock speeds. Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors include a number Continue reading ion P-series Servers with Intel Xeon Scalable Processors
As part of ION’s extensive benchmarking of the SR-71mach5 SpeedServer platform, ION uncovered a memory leak in Windows Server 2012 R2 acting as an SMB3 File Server under very heavy load. There does not seem to be an issue with larger blocks or when the queue depth is low, but you can watch it in action here while serving 8kB random reads with 16 Continue reading Memory Leak Found
2019 Update: Intel Xeon Scalable Processors have added significant support for NVMe SSDs. We believe that these improvements make NVMe SSDs the high performance storage approach of choice, but have not yet been able to complete testing of that theory. Our recommendations at this point are to use NVMe where performance matters. And where the highest level of performance with the lowest possible latency Continue reading Observations on NVMe SSDs in Server Applications
Much of modern storage management focuses on efficient use and allocation of storage capacity. “Thin provisioning” is a primary mechanism for this, allocating just enough space to match each consumer‘s current needs, while promising more capacity when needed. Thin provisioning is an effective tool for allocation of storage capacity. When latency, bandwidth and IOPS are more important, thin provisioning makes these performance results nondeterministic. Continue reading Thin Provisioning: Nondeterministic Storage Feature #2