zfs discuss - May 2010 - Review: SuperMicro’s SC847 (SC847A) 4U chassis with 36 drive bays

http://www.natecarlson.com/2010/05/07/review-supermicros-sc847a-4u-chassis-with-36-drive-bays/

Review: SuperMicro?s SC847 (SC847A) 4U chassis with 36 drive bays

May 7, 2010 ? 9 comments

in Geek Stuff, Linux, Storage, Virtualization, Work Stuff

SuperMicro SC847 Thumbnail

[Or "my quest for the ultimate home-brew storage array."] At my day
job, we
use a variety of storage solutions based on the type of data we?re hosting.
Over the last year, we have started to deploy SuperMicro-based hardware with
OpenSolaris and ZFS for storage of some classes of data. The systems we have
built previously have not had any strict performance requirements, and were
built with SuperMicro?s SC846E2 chassis, which supports 24 total SAS/SATA
drives, with an integrated port multiplier in the backplane to support
multipath to SAS drives. We?re building out a new system that we hope to be
able to promote to tier-1 for some ?less critical data?, so we wanted better
drive density and more performance. We landed on the relatively new
SuperMicro SC847 chassis, which supports 36 total 3.5? drives (24 front and
12 rear) in a 4U enclosure. While researching this product, I didn?t find
many reviews and detailed pictures of the chassis, so figured I?d take some
pictures while building the system and post them for the benefit of anyone
else interested in such a solution.

In the systems we?ve built so far, we?ve only deployed SATA drives since
OpenSolaris can still get us decent performance with SSD for read and write
cache. This means that in the 4U cases we?ve used with integrated port
multipliers, we have only used one of the two SFF-8087 connectors on the
backplane; this works fine, but limits the total throughput of all drives in
the system to 4 3gbit/s channels (on this chassis, 6 drives would be on each
3gbit channel.) On our most recent build, we built it with the intention of
using it both for ?nearline?-class storage, and as a test platform to see if
we can get the performance we need to store VM images. As part of this
decision, we decided to go with a backplane that supports full throughput to
each drive.

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