Advatronix Cirrus 1200: a Storage Server Under Your Desk

Benchmark Configuration

When we look at the market of competing tower servers, almost all of them use some form of LSI RAID chip. In the low-end and midrange server market, the slightly older (2012) but mature dual-core LSI 2208 chip is by far the most popular solution. Most tower servers also ship with a Xeon E5, so we wanted our Cirrus 1200 configuration to reflect that. However, most tower servers have fewer disks bays. In a nutshell, the typical competing tower has a faster CPU, eight 3.5" diskbays, and a dual-core LSI RAID chip. So we wanted our competing configuration to reflect that.

We converted the components of our Supermicro 2U 6027R-73DARF into a tower server and inserted an LSI MegaRAID 9265-8i. The LSI MegaRAID 9265-8i is not the latest LSI controller, but it uses an LSI 2208 RAID-on-Chip (RoC). This RoC is a dual-core PowerPC at 800 MHz with a 1333 MHz DDR3 interface.

Supermicro 6027R-73DARF

We enabled CacheCade and Fastpath.

The disk caches are of course disabled. The two disks in RAID-1 house the OS and the database logs. We use only four drives for the data of our SQL Server database. The reason is is so we can measure whether the Cirrus 1200 (with 12 + 6 disks bays) has an advantage in our workload over a typical tower server that comes with 8 disks bays.

Advatronix Cirrus 1200

We use an eight drive setup in RAID-10 for our data; this way we can also have hotspare disk.

Avatronix uses the Adaptec ASR71605Q, which is based on the MIPS 1004k with 2 cores at 1 GHz. The two disks in RAID-1 house the OS and the database logs. The heavy duty SQL Server 2012 database is located on the eight disk RAIDset. The two Intel SSD710 are used as "Maxcache", Adaptec nomenclature for an SSD cache. We could have given the Cirrus 1200 more SSDs (up to six), but it would increase the cost significantly and there is no reason why adding more SSDs would help in our specific benchmarks. We tested with up to 1024 connections requesting a transaction every 100 ms, which is a very high load for such a small business server, but it's still unlikely to overwhelm our SSD cache.