Solid State Drives

bbrown

I am looking for some feedback from people out there that have NAV systems running with SSD. While I appreciate all feedback, I am not looking for what you may have read or heard. I can and have done lots of reading myself. And also have experience in non-NAV environments. I'm looking for feedback from people that actually have runnign systems. Preferably with databases larger than 200 GB and at least 50 users. Larger is even better.

In your opinion is SSD worth the added expense? WHy or why not?

What class/type of drives are you using? How are they configured (RAID)?

Are you usign them for both data and log? or just Data?

Any other info you might see as noteable.

Thanks for all feedback.

ppavuk

Would be interesting. just leave this reply to keep myself posted.

David_Singleton

Definitely you can make a faster Navision server with SSDs. But if it's more expensive or not I am not sure. You can't just plug SSDs into a configuration for Hard Drives and expect it to suddenly fly. In fact it can slow down. I have seen two major issues with SSDs and NAV.

One is that the channel now becomes the bottle neck (assuming you have a very fast controller) and thus it needs to be properly tuned to the server. In a VM Ware environment (which is pretty much all the Nav implementations I work with these days) you need to be sure that VM understands what is going on and can handle the through put.

Second is that RAM and CPU are now completely different to what we have been thinking in the past. You can't simply add more RAM now, because the Drives are so fast, that you are basically moving data from RAM to RAM and the CPUs will over load. Its quite strange after all these years to see a Navision SQL server running with all cores at 100% continuously. So you now need more CPU and less RAM.

But to answer the question, Yes I think it's worth it. Just don't pull out the old drives and plug SSDs in and expect it all to work.

Oh and a third thing, keep in mind how VSIFT is written asynchronosly, and you can see that you might stat to get a lot of new deadlocks.

David_Singleton

As to configuration, the server I am talking about here is RAID 10 with everything on the one RAID. But if I designed it from scratch I would thing RAID 5 with a really good controller would have been faster.

ppavuk

What about something like this? Must be rocket-fast!

http://www.storagereview.com/intel_ssd_ ... cie_review

David_Singleton

ppavuk wrote:

What about something like this? Must be rocket-fast!

http://www.storagereview.com/intel_ssd_ ... cie_review

Yes I have heard that they are blindingly fast for Navision, and the person that told me is probably reading this, so I will leave it to him to add more if he wants, as I agree with Brian, that this topic needs to be based on first hand experience.

bbrown

Those boards do look very interesting, but I also see them as being outside the budget range of many NAV clients. FusionIO has a 5TB version that sells for around $90,000. Smaller ~1 TB version can still sell for $15K to $20K give or take. We do have one client running a 1.5 TB BI database across 4 FusionIO cards. Yes, it's fast.

My interested and questions are more with the standard drive style units. Even there, there is quite a range in specifications and pricing.

ppavuk

We do have one customer running raid10 on intel 520 SSD. DB is 200GB and log is 120gB, all on separate physical drives. Something about 30 users, and this setup works pretty well. They got 20GB ledger entry dimension table, and after they went to SSD - things improved very much. Don't ask me why the use desktop drives in server - it was customers decision. But, those intel 520 are chip!