I was talking to a customer this week who was looking to deploy various 4 node VSAN configurations. They needed a solution which would provide them performance and wanted to minimize the moving components due to the location and environmental aspects of the deployment, all-flash VSAN is definitely a great choice for this scenario. I looked at various server vendors and based on their requirements (and budget) provided them a nice configuration (in my opinion) which comes in for slightly less than $ 45K.
What I found interesting is the price of the SSDs, especially the “capacity tier” as the price is very close to SAS 10K RPM. I selected the Intel S3500 as the capacity tier as it was one of the cheapest listed that is part of the VMware VSAN HCL, will be good to track GB/$ for new entries on the HCL that will be coming soon, so far S3500 seems to be the sweet spot. Also seems that from a price point perspective the 800GB devices are most cost effective at the moment. The 3500 seems to perform well as demonstrated in this paper by VMware on VSAN scaling / performance.
This is what the bill of materials looked like, and I can’t wait to see it deployed:
- Supermicro SuperServer 2028TP-HC0TR – 2U TwinPro2
- Each node comes with:
- 2 x Eight-Core Intel Xeon Processor E5-2630 v3 2.40GHz 20MB Cache (85W)
- 256 GB in 8 DIMMs at 2133 MHz (32GB DIMMs)
- 2 x 10GbE NIC port
- 1 x 4
- Dual 10-Gigabit Ethernet
- LSI 3008 12G SAS
That is a total of 16TB of flash based storage capacity, 1TB of memory and 64 cores in mere 2U. The above price is based on a simple online configurator and does not include any licenses, a very compelling solution if you ask me.