PCI-E Flash based storage support

[Dave Genton]

Any talk of supporting pci express based flash ?? I'd like to host some iSCSI LUNs on OCZ PCI based SSD's for those needing higher performance and IOPS such as the 10gig connected vmware hosts. Just curious being a Data Center Engineer in the middle of all this Data Center 3.0 re-architecture with consolidation and virtualization going on. Cisco UCS and many others are all bringing about support for local and distributed PCI-E flash storage for acceleration and high iop applications. I use FreeNAS on several servers in my lab to emulate my "real world" storage for iSCSI, NFS & CIFS mostly with vmware allowing me to expand on vmware and particuarly the network in the middle, network quality of service settings etc.

 

[mav@]

"pci express based flash" is very wide definition. FreeBSD includes, and FreeNAS 9.3 will include official nvme(4) driver for Intel PCIe SSDs. FisionIO use proprietary chips, but provide own drivers (AFAIK they provided FreeBSD drivers on request). Early OCZ RevoDrive used SiliconImage SATA chips, that in theory should be supported by siis(4) driver. Later (2/3?) RevoDrive's AFAIK switched to Marvell SAS HBA chips, that have no FreeBSD driver. What use latest OCZ and other vendors -- I have no idea, I think some used LSI SAS, that hopefully may be supported by existing mps(4)/mpr(4) drivers. There is still no unification on that market aside AHCI and NVME, which FreeNAS could easily support. :(

I am now working on set of NFS and iSCSI optimizations, that allow to deliver more then 500K IOPS, to saturate 2x10GigE even with smallest block size, and to make even fast SSDs busy. :)