We are in the process of changing our old storage software for new, Starwind is on our shortlist.
we now have 2 dedicated storage servers with an traditional raid controller with 40 disk raid 10, and 4 ssd's in raid 10 with cachecade caching.
the current software takes care of the HA/Replica/ISCSI targets but does nothing in improving the performance, this is all relying on the HW controller.
no need to discuss this further: we dont like it and we want more out of our hardware.
With Starwind i think we see 2 options.
1: keep the raid 10 configuration, add some more RAM (currently 32gb?), setup windows/starwind san, add the SSD's to starwind cache.
2: Replace raid with SAS HBA (or check if we can use current raid controllers as passthrough devices), add some more ram (currently 32gb), setup windows with tiered storage spaces, probably add some more SSD drives and add Starwind to this, dont add caching ssd's to starwind, only use the RAM caching of starwind.
What option would give me the best performance or other benefits, it is a bit unclear to me.
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