Willott

Yep, but when do we then break from - oh, we may as well just use SAS because that's what's always been used in this situation... as more people start to use SSDs and as SSD technology progresses (to be honest, I think we're at tipping point now), the price of SSDs will come down, and the other benefits of SSDs will start to be more apparent (power savings add up over time, less noise and vibration, less heat released so less cooling required). I see no reason why the following cannot happen now: Low-medium write requirements - prosumer SSD High write requirements - enterprise SSD (or RAM SSD as cache to mass storage) Mass storage - NL-SAS or SATA (dependant on other components in system) Hopefully a larger shift to SSD will then force both HDD manufacturers and SSD manufacturers to reconsider their pricing and the technologies they use. Until electron spin storage becomes commercial, why don't we look at ways to shift the demand to SSDs and in doing so cause a drop in both HDD prices (large supply, small demand, so price has to decrease) and increase the pressure on SSD manufacturers to improve both storage speed, latency and reliability and increase capacity.

Oh, other thing I forgot to put on previous post: Power requirements for SSD < Power requirements for 15K SAS HDD If you want higher performance from SAS, add more spindles, which requires more physical space and more power (and more cooling and a noisier system). In some ways, I'm tempted by building several ITX boxes with SSDs and have multiple in a DFSR namespace, low powered boards and SSDs, they're only file servers, so the CPU requirements are fairly insignificant... a lot cheaper than full enterprise solutions, and you get your reliability, stability and in some cases performance from your increase in devices - someone earlier said they ran a 10 server Citrix farm based on desktop components - was this because desktop components were cheaper? Could the farm handle outages better than a farm built of 3 enterprise class devices (which is what you'd probably get for the same cost) and was the performance as good or better? For the same cost as an HP server with Enterprise SSD, you could probably build 4 mini itx boxes, with desktop SSD, 2 mini itx (and you'd still be using less power than the HP box, and you can get 2 mini itx in a 1u case), for HP with SAS you'd probably be able to do 2 mini itx with SSDs, much quicker access, less power. You may not need the performace, but if you can have the performance for the same cost and put in place other things to assist with reliability and the other issues brought up so far, why not have it? Who's to say that in a year's time, the school will go BYOD requiring access for all students to the file server, with several hundred random IOs per second as students access and write their files? We have a mix of all devices here (SAS HDD, SATA HDD, SSD), the only place I'm looking at buying new drives, I look to either SSD, or for large requirements 7.2k SAS - using SSD/RAM to cache. I'm just going to flick back to the FlacheSAN2 device - aparently they consider prosumer SSDs (intel 520) suitable for enterprise environments - you're not after all going to put a device with that spec in a house - so why shouldn't we?

Dell, HP etc supply enterprise SSDs because they can charge a premium for them, and they reduce the likelihood of further support requirements. There is no reason they couldn't supply "desktop" SSDs with limited warranties and overprovisioning, apart from the fact that they can't charge such a premium. Taking the write limitation out of the equation: Generally speaking (SSD being desktop SATA 3.0 ie Intel 520) Write IOPs SSD > Write IOPs 15K SAS Read IOPs SSD > Read IOPs 15K SAS Write throughput SSD > Write throughput 15K SAS Read throughput SSD > Read throughput 15K SAS Price for 480GB SSD is only slightly more expensive than a 15K 300GB SAS (20% over provision the SSD to get better endurance and better performance over time) Again, it all depends on the actual write figures. I don't think many of us on this forum have a true "heavy" write situation, we're not running constant video editing, we don't have massive oracle databases with constant transactions, we're not talking about saving CCTV images onto it, we're not talking Facebook database servers, we're talking day to day file data... for 12hrs to the day there'll be little to no writes (that big bit overnight when there are no staff or students in school, and those staff working off site won't be doing massive amounts of writes). I have a feeling if we all looked over a period of a few days, we'd see we probably don't hit more than 20GB writes per day (and if you do, then consumer SSD probably isn't for you... unless you over provision). But, without knowing write characteristics, no further comment can be made to the specific case.

Found some possible software, just testing out SsdReady: Life measurement and monitoring tool for solid-state drives which seems to monitor writes - leave it running for a couple of days on your fileserver and it should give you a decent estimate of actual writes. Currently running it on our student file server out of interest...

They do wear out - however, you can keep a close eye on how long they have left (you could probably set up a SMART monitor to check the life remaining smart code). It all depends on the write levels you're doing. 2GB a day is how much your backups are increasing - that doesn't necessarily take into account changes to files which don't increase in size or files that increase in size, but are rewritten (or the way the read/write cycle works - Windows may rewrite the entire file, not just write the additional blocks). Still trying to find a suitable utility to give a clear picture on actual write load per day... But even saying that, you're probably nowehere near a full disk write per day, so I can't see if being an issue.

Which is why I suggested checking out the amount of data written on current file server on a daily basis (or for the past month). This will give a rough idea of the estimated life of the drive. Also, with over provisioning, you could extend the life. Just trying to find something that will give stats on windows file server for data written.

If only they used ZFS instead of fakeraid/hardware raid, I'd take a look. Currently, ZFS seems to take the biscuit - I'll stick with my OI based SAN for now, will start looking at active-passive clustering. Does Open-E use a clustered filesystem (if so what)? Does it share storage with 2 heads, or it is a dual head, dual storage setup (ie do you have to replicate storage in much the same way as Microsoft DFS or can you share SAS level)?

Apologies for double posting - http://cache-www.intel.com/cd/00/00/49/23/492354_492354.pdf page 12 suggests there may be a 4x increase in write endurance for 20% over provision. Over provisioning does seem to be one way to significantly extend the life of write heavy workload SSDs.

Just as a play about after the above super SAN... Anyone want to build a 5TB (suggest 2.5TB Usable) SSD SAN for ~10k in 2U? Spec list below for those interested: Supermicro CSE-216A-R900LPB 2U Chassis Supermicro X9DAi Motherboard 2x Xeon E5-2670 8 core 2.6GHz CPU 2x Xeon Heatsinks (Supermicro ones) 16x 16GB PC3-10600 ECC DDR3 RAM 2x 120GB Intel 520 SSD (Mirrored Boot) 22x 240GB Intel 520 SSD (suggest ZFS pool of mirrored vdevs) 3x LSI 9207-8i HBAs 2x Intel X520-DA2 10GbE (or swap out for something higher...) Could always look to throw a small Fusion IODrive2 in for write caching... and upgrading to 16x 32GB sticks of RAM for bigger ARC... Use a ZFS based OS (Nexenta, Openindiana, Freenas, etc), away you go. But anyway... The other thing to consider is cost of replacement devices - could you buy a replacement SSD every 2 years (for example - depends on load on server and write cycles, may need to be each year) for cheaper than an enterprise device, clone your server across to the new disk and run off there (considering you're using DFS, you could happily take a server down for an hour whilst cloning...). Do a full wipe on your removed disk and stick it in a desktop around site to work out it's remaining life. And as technology advances, as you replace with a new device, you may have a bigger or more reliable device when you buy in 2 years time to replace the current one... just spitballing an idea there... Of course, you could look to build a shared storage device, store your files and VMs on there, and use SSD and RAM caching (feel free to ask about this if you want more info) - which may be more expensive than building an individual server, but is the way we've gone.

Build it yourself, use ZFS based OS... From the brief read I just did it seems to be fairly standard components, no hardware raid (though custom case and drive bays from what I've seen recently), will include a worked on OS, but I reckon I could put something similar together...

Out of interest - CrystalDiskInfo - Software - Crystal Dew World somewhere within that it should give you a drive life remaining - would be interested to see on your SIMs server. Cheers Will

Used the free version a while back for something, did the job, but weren't asking much of it. Didn't really feel comfortable with the run from USB stick idea (you only find you've got an issue with your usb stick if you need to reboot for whatever reason) and lack of mirroring on boot device.

I think they may have been talking about MLC vs SLC (multi level cell vs single level cell) NAND, the actual memory data is stored on. The SSD Company - STEC - CellCare Technology talks about Stec's technology to extend the life of MLC (there are other manufacturers who use other techs) - but it all depends on how much data you write to the device - EMC look at a point of view of a large enterprise who write several hundred GB of data each day, rather than a school who may write 5-10 GB data per day, not much of an SSD, so as long as wear levelling works correctly, the life of the drive may be longer than the manufacturer suggests - this very much depends on the actual amount of data written. As can be seen on the Stec page, enterprise devices have a much longer working life, but I know of a large number of comercial hosting and service providers who use Intel 320s in their servers. The idea of using DFSR - data replicated and accessible from multiple nodes. If a machine goes down, force remove from DFS, replace the disk, stick a new copy of windows on, add it as a DFSR replication target, add as a DFS folder target. Fairly quick and simple.

Check how much data you write to your current file server on a daily basis (not sure how you'd do this) - this would give you a clue as to estimated life of drive (Intel publish the write endurance of their SSDs). To look to extend the life, if you can afford to, overprovision the drives, this gives more space for garbage collection and wear levelling, less storage space, but reportedly longer lifespan. I would think about having 2 servers with a single SSD in each, running DFS, then, for your backup server, have spinning rust - your backups should send data in large chunks, rather than small random accesses which your file server will have to deal with - throughput to spinning rust isn't too bad, and if you have 4x drives in RAID10 you ensure your backup data is secure, get speed benefits of RAID0 and you should have more space to be able to have a longer backup retention. Of course, if one of your DFS servers goes down, get it back up as a priority, or, have 3 DFS servers (possibly one in a separate building - though you need to ensure you have decent link speed) and then having one down is less of an issue. From the size of the drives and as they're being used as for fileserver only, I don't think 10GbE would be of much benefit (how much of your current connections do you currently use)? If you were looking to have the servers as SAN for Hyper-V (Server 2012 with it's hyper-v using SMB - if I've read that correctly on the brief looks I've had at Server 2012 Hyper-V), then 10GbE may be beneficial.

Is the offer enough for you to buy a new place and a new wardrobe (or second hand off ebay)? If there's no family heirloom type reason, why not sell it?

@Axel - will the M80F have an upgrade to allow NLA at any point? Also, how's your new terminal coming on?

All gone... I just missed them

As far as release goes, I'd set your repro technician to be able to "release for the following users", they'll then be able to swipe and release jobs for other users at the copier. You could do this with a print release station as well. The other part was so that the repro technician can print documents from her machine and set where to charge (rather than setting charging for already sent job).

I've got a windows 2012 server here, with RDSH as a possible installable role. From the looks of the info you've posted, you're looking at Remote Data Services rather than Remote Desktop Session.

Have the users print to the copier (each with their own account setup). For the repro user, within papercut there's a field titled "allow user to release jobs for" or similar - add all the users you want in there. The only thing with this, is it will release all jobs in one go iirc, so working out which job is which may be difficult, unless the option to add header sheet has appeared in scripting. The other thing we've done for our repro tech is give her the manager mode pop up, she can then print stuff from her computer and charge to the relevant person and department. Cheers Will

We have our paper form converted into a word document with only selected edittable fields, this can be emailed attached with the work they want copying/printing. I'm considering coding a webpage with the options on (which changes availability of options as they select things), and they'll upload the file they want copying/printing (which then sends to repro mailbox with email formatted with instructions). Could potentially add in ability for it to open the uploaded file and calculate a cost estimate for the job... but that would be secondary attack...

there seems to be something up with HP's formatter factories... had to do this in a less precise gas oven to a P2015N formatter - may do this to one of the P3005's that going a little dodge... and then we have a CP4025DN formatter fail (fortunately in warranty), but wouldn't put that past some dry joints or other. Think my recipe was gas mark 4 for a few mins.

Apologies for my lack of reply. Proc mon is a download from Microsoft iirc, if you load it up, then load whichever program you have the issue with, let the issue happen, then stop capture in proc mon. You can then filter by process name (for flash I think that's flash.exe) then do a find for "denied" and see if anything comes up.

From the looks of it, ytimg.com seems to be widely mentioned in the source html - may be worth a try

Fire one this way please