Solid State Drives

asked on November 4, 2014

Last year at the empower conference I attended a session about how to create the best Laserfiche environment along with the different trade offs of each option. At one point the discussion turned to installing a SSD for the tempdb database to reside and how that would significantly increase I/O performance.

I went back through my notes and downloaded the powerpoint presented for that session, but I am unable to find any specific system requirements to setup a Laserfiche environment in this architecture.

I am looking for some gauge/advice as to how big the SSD should be, how this would effect the RAID configuration or any other server configurations to make sure the Laserfiche environment can perform best.

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replied on November 5, 2014

Hi David,

I have also looked into using SSD for one of my customers in their Laserfiche environment. Although we have not implemented it yet, the discussion mostly revolved around better I/O throughput and where we want this to happen.

When looking at your Laserfiche environment, one must understand two basic things:

1. There is a SQL database

2. There are volumes

You can target I/O performance for both of the above. The SQL database files (Repository, Workflow, Forms, tempdb etc.) are stored on a location somewhere on the SQL server's hard drive. If that hard drive hosting the SQL files was a SSD, then the I/O performance of the SQL databases would increase significantly. This could mean faster searching, browsing for the user.

If you target the performance of file retrieval on the volumes, then you should ensure that those volumes are pointing to your SSD. This should offer increased performance for any operations that would involve the volumes, like creating and retrieving files.

Since SSD at this stage is very expensive, I think you will get the best value for your money by adding a SSD drive to your SQL server first and pointing your database files to this SSD as a start. Investing in SSD for your volumes can be a very expensive task, considering that the volume size can grow quickly.

Then, if running RAID on either of the above, depending on your configuration of RAID, you will need to consider the cost of SSD used for redundancy. For example, if you're mirroring your disks, then you need to add more SSD drives, but may not get any increased storage capacity. That will be an expensive exercise.

Also consider the fact that there are SSD drives currently being manufactured specifically for server use, where the expected read/write operations are expected to be high. These type of SSD drives offer longer life expectancy.

In general, treat the SSD as a normal HDD, knowing it will offer better performance no matter where you install it. To my knowledge, there is no specific Laserfiche system requirement in order to use SSD.

Hope this helps you.

Cheers

Sheldon

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