Simon,

I can't speak specifically to the FS-900, since I generally use Dell Compellent 
and NetApp EF arrays for flash today.  But I also take care to ensure that the 
system pool metadata NSDs use RAID10 (or equivalent) rather than RAID5/6.  For 
small 4K metadata writes, on a 4K blocksize LUN this could result in optimal 
writes.  For larger native blocksize LUNs, it eliminates the parity calculation 
for read-modify-write operations.

Thanks,
Paul

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Simon Thompson 
(Research Computing - IT Services)
Sent: Monday, May 16, 2016 9:44 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [gpfsug-discuss] Flash for metadata

Hi all

I'm currently about to deploy some flash systems (FS-900) to take our metadata 
for one of our Spectrum Scale file-systems. We use 4k inodes for this 
file-system.

On the FS-900, when creating a volume, we get a choice of 512b or 4k sectors. 
Does anyone have a suggestion on this? On a spinning disk RAID array, I get 
what a strip size is and we'd use multiples of the stripe where possible for 
the block size.

Is the sector size on the FS-900 the smallest chunk that can be written out? 
And so would it make sense to use 4k sectors for 4k GPFS inodes right?

Related. In the deployment guide for the FS-900 arrays, if one is using a 
file-system (e.g. XFS) on the array the guide talks about aligning the 
partitions with with array, when GPFS is used on a storage array, does it 
automatically work out the sector alignment?


Thanks

Simon
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