storage spaces \ tiering

[ryan1212]

Hello,

I have been using some Proliant DL180G6's and a Dell poweredge 2950 III as repositories. They run Server 2012R2 and deduplication role, and I am using the HP\ Dell controllers to provide RAID 5 arrays. On the 12 bay proliants I have two arrays of six disks in each chassis.

This has worked really well for us, and the time has finally come to replace the old PE2950, and I am curious about windows storage spaces and tiering. About a year ago, I did a lab test with an old supermicro server with a 3ware card where I installed 3x1tb WD Green(eew) drives and 3x120GB SSDs and set them both up in parity mode in storage spaces, and got what I considered to be really good throughput. Right now I have synthetic full jobs that run for 10+ hours on the current hardware.

An annoyance I found was that I could not figure out how to set up two pools of disks in storage spaces with tiering unless both were at the same protection level (mirror, parity, etc). I also have read it is somehow possible to use SSD as a write-back cache for storage spaces.

Has anyone placed with storage spaces and tiering as a veeam repository? I understand that the SSDs will get worn out rather quickly, but as long as they are mirrored I am not too worried. If this kind of set up could drastically improve backup times and make it more feasible to run VMs directly off the repository if I ever had to in a production mode I think this would be a really good solution.

[Shestakov]

Hello Ryan,
Since nobody answered sharing their own experience so far, I would suggest to use advanced search for related topics discussing storage spaces tiering implementation.
By the way, we are working on some improvements for future releases in that direction.
Thanks!