Support for NVMe devices / Performance

[raymondjt]

Hi StarWind,
nowadays more and more enterprise stroage is changing from classic harddrives to ssd (sata / sas) and the new interface NVMe.

1. Does the StarWind Virtual SAN support NVMe?

2. What would be the performance difference if the "flash cache" is on a RAID1 SAS SSD or on a NVMe device?

3. What about the fault tolerance for the "flash cache"?

4. If I had 10.000 Dollars for a StarWind server (only hardware), should I invest in CPU, RAM, NVMe, SSDs, SAS3/SAS2 15k rpm, 10k rpm, SATA?
I made some disk IO tests and the results are quite different.
One example - old SAS2 with old StarWind v6 have a pretty good IOPS value compared to hard disks only or without StarWind. But the same performance tests show significant improvement, if SAS3 15k rpm drives are used. Another big leap when using NWMe (as Intel P3700).

One more technical question, as far as I know, NVMe interface have no possible "fault tolerance" from outside (like SAS3 with RAID1 and so on), corect me if I'm wrong.
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Would it be a stable approach, to have nodes with "all NVMe devices" (in this case, what would be the 'flash cache'?) and have the partner node synchronized with StarWind Virtual SAN software?
If yes or possible, what would be the bandwidth needed for the sync channels?

Kind regards
Raymond

[darklight]

As far as I know starwind supports NVMe for both - as storage and as the cache. Obviously, if you have an all-flash host, you do not have L2 caching since you are already flash (you might use NVMe/PCIe Flash/FusionIO as L2 caching for all-SSD host). I believe 40Gbit network for sync is a must in such case.

[Tarass (Staff)]

Thanks, darklight.

Any further information needed?