Performance Review of HP Proliant ML150 G9 with SAS

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networkn

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#193792 24-Mar-2016 13:36

Hi.

Any of you guys/girls deployed these servers, who have some commentary about performance in RAID 5, with Zero cache controller?

I am a little worried it will reduce the performance to that of a decent sata drive!

Dynamic

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#1519068 24-Mar-2016 14:06

No experience with this model though we use Proliant servers almost exclusively.

RAID5 on zero cache sounds like it is likely to be horrible. We moved away from RAID5 some years ago and do a RAID10 for most installations these days (on cached and non-cached controllers. It's performance is not fabulous on zero cache controllers of course but is fine for light workloads. No chance the client will stretch to a small cache module?

https://www.storagecraft.com/blog/raid-performance/

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#1519590 25-Mar-2016 12:44

If you can afford it go with the ML3xx or DL3xx range. They will be far superior.

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#1521975 29-Mar-2016 07:32

RAID5 isn't a good idea on SATA disk over 1TB either. RAID6 or RAID10 are your better options.

networkn

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#1522018 29-Mar-2016 08:57

darylblake:

If you can afford it go with the ML3xx or DL3xx range. They will be far superior.

Yes, 99% of what we sell are ML350's but for a very small group of customers we consider other options for budgetary reasons.

Traditionally I wouldn't touch a SATA Server with a 50 Foot Barge Pole, connected to another 75 Foot barge pole, but this being a SAS server, I imagine performance would be reasonably better.

I am really just trying to determine the real world performance of it with zero cache.

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#1522082 29-Mar-2016 09:39

What sort of disks are you running? 10K sas, 7.2K NL sas? what size? what sort of workload? lots of writes, mostly reads? What sort of perf are they requiring on site?

We have an older ML1xx server but with a cheap zero-cache Intel raid card and 7.2K sata disks, perf is OK, not sparkling, but acceptable for cheap file storage. It is mostly large VHD's for backup and a bunch of install files. From memory we get between 80MB/s and 100MB/s write and about the same for read. If using 10K sas, I would expect 100MB/s write and 150MB/s read. A bit better than a 7.2K sata disk, but as you say, not as good as a 10K sas.

Can you go with larger disks and use a raid 1 mirror instead of 3 disks and raid 5? Could theoretically have better perf than a raid 5 solution due to not requiring parity calculations for every write. Will also have much faster rebuilds in the event of a disk failure.

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networkn

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#1522083 29-Mar-2016 09:41

Hi.

File and Print is the main purpose, with Exchange. They are 10K SAS 300GB Drives.

The drives are bundled so not really an option to change.

Dynamic

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#1523144 31-Mar-2016 09:56

We have a couple of smaller sites running SBS2011 incl Exchange 2010 for 10 users on zero cache RAID10 and 7K2 SATA drives. Performance is not stellar by any means but is perfectly acceptable for the end users. No booting speed records are in any danger.

Can you offload the email workload to Office 365 using $5 per mailbox accounts? It would be nice to to hammer a zero-cache system with an Exchange database.

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