Over the coming month I will be architecting, building and testing a modular, high performance SSD-only storage solution.
I’ll be documenting my progress / findings along the way and open sourcing all the information as a public guide.
With recent price drops and durability improvements in solid state storage now is better time than any to ditch those old magnets.
Modular server manufacturers such as SuperMicro have spent large on R&D thanks to the ever growing requirements from cloud vendors that utilise their hardware.

Sam McLeod

A detailed planning post for building a custom high-performance SSD-only SAN (Storage Area Network) as an alternative to expensive proprietary enterprise storage. The author outlines requirements including 450,000 IOPS read performance, 20Gbit redundant networking, and a target cost under $9,500 per node. The hardware stack centers on a SuperMicro 1028R server with Intel DC P3600 NVMe PCIe SSDs and SanDisk Extreme Pro SATA SSDs. Software choices include Debian, MDADM for software RAID, DRBD for node replication, Pacemaker for IP failover, and Open-iSCSI for storage presentation. The post also covers the advantages of NVMe over AHCI and relevant Linux kernel improvements for high-performance SSD I/O.

Building a high performance SSD SAN - Part 1