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Plexistor SDM multi tier support
- The 1st tier resides in memory. Either on NVDIMM-N or volatile DRAM,
depending if persistency is a requirement.
The use of volatile DRAM is acceptable in two scenarios:
- Test & Dev (For non production, and for testing)
- Ephemeral computing, such as EC2, in which persistency of the local storag is irrelevant.
- The 2nd tier is a FLASH-based block-device. This tier is optional and limited in capacity to 12.5 times the capacity of the first tier.
On and off-prem:
Plexistor SDM CE is available for public cloud and for on-premise deloyment.
- For public cloud users, a pre-installed AMI is available on AWS marketplace (here). These are based on the latest Ubuntu distribution and i2.*xlarge instance types.
- For on-prem users, an install script designed for physical machines is available for download (here).
For simplicity, the install script is designed for DRAM users (i.e. Ephemeral and Test&Dev use cases). Building a persistent hot tier requires the use of server from our Hardware Compatibility List (HCL, as detailed below).
Supported Operating systems
Plexistor SDM is designed for Linux. It uses a relatively new driver (pmem*m) and is thus supported on relatively new distributions:
- Ubuntu 16.04 (AWS and on prem)
- RHEL/CentOS 7.2 and 7.3 (on prem)
- Oracle Linux 6.8 and 7.2 (on prem)
This list will grow with time
Supported Hardware – HCL
Cloud users are welcome to use the i2 instance types:
i2.xlarge – Mem – 14GB, SDM – 200GB, SSD – 600GB
i2.2xlarge – Mem – 30GB, SDM – 400GB, SSD – 1.2TB
i2.4xlarge – Mem – 32GB, SDM – 1.1TB, SSD – 2TB
i2.8xlarge – Mem – 32GB, SDM – 2.6TB, SSD – 3.7TB
On-prem users should review the following table
| Ephemeral or Test&Dev. users | NVDIMM users | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Server | NA | Server with ADR support | |
| CPU | Single or Dual socket, Intel XEON E5-26xx v3 or v4 (e.g. Dual socket E5-2650v3) |
||
| Memory | At least 64GB | At least a DIMM card per socket (e.g. 16GB DIMM per socket) |
|
| Storage tiers* | NVDIMM cards | NA (will use volatile memory to mimic NVDIMMs) | 4/6/8 DDR4 NVDIMM-N cards certified by the server vendor (e.g. 3*16GB NVDIMMs per socket) |
| Flash | NVMe devices are preferred, but aggregating several SSDs via Linux LVM or using an AFA LUN are also valid options. Limited in capacity to 12.5 times the capacity of the first tier |
||
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