Anyone have experience with the LSI Megaraid cards and the CacheCade Pro addon?  It lets you use a fast SSD card as a front-end cache for reads and writes to the drives on controller.

 

 

I do not have any experience with product.

 

I have seen it mentioned more then once at work. My understanding is that it is a Windows application that lets you use any of the LSI SAS2 (6Gb/s) models. it uses one of the cards ports as a cache drive for lack of a better description.

 

You buy this as an addon for the megaraid software. it then uses the SSD in a fashion similar to the way a single Hard Drive would use it's own cache and then some.

 

It would be used as a buffer or landing zone for incoming files and files on the Array that have lots of constant transactions.

 

My understanding is the only systems that really benefit from it would be arrays with a lot of disk IO. Say SQL, Exchange, Microsoft Hypervisor server. Etc.

It moves those transactions to the SSD so that the array is not crippled allowing for other transactions.

 

For the average server, there would be no benefit. it might even be a bottleneck?

 

also keep in mind, this is intended for servers with 3Gb-10GB NIC cards and a crapload of user/Application pounding on the box.

 

I think this is a workaround for the fact that you cant get a 128Gig ram chip to put onto a raid adapter.

 

Again, I could be totally wrong .. again.