Users Guide

CacheCade

The Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller (PERC) H710, H710P, and H810 cards support CacheCade, a feature

that can improve application performance by increasing read caching capacity. The CacheCade feature

makes use of high performing solid state disks (SSDs) as a secondary tier of cache. CacheCade provides

faster reads and maximizes transactional I/O performance.

NOTE: PERC H310 does not support Cachecade.

The use of SSDs for caching allows a large quantity of data to be present in the cache, resulting in

performance improvement in read-intensive applications. Some examples of read-intensive applications

include online transaction processing (OLTP), file server, and web server workloads. CacheCade allows

for an increase in the I/O performance of hard disk drive (HDD)-based disk groups with the assistance of

SSD technology.

CacheCade Virtual Disk Characteristics

The following are the CacheCade virtual disk characteristics:

• Support for CacheCade virtual disks exists only on controllers containing 1 GB of Non-Volatile (NV)

Cache.

• CacheCade virtual disks can only be created with SSDs.

• The maximum combined size of CacheCade virtual disks is 512 GB.

NOTE: Multiple CacheCade virtual disks may be created, but they are combined to operate as a

single cache pool up to the maximum size.

• Data on virtual disks containing secured Self-Encrypting Disks (SEDs) or SSDs will not be cached by

CacheCade.

NOTE: Data on VDs with unsecured SEDs can be cached using CacheCade.

• CacheCade virtual disks only cache input reads that are smaller than 64 KB.

• CacheCade virtual disks are read cache only.

• CacheCade virtual disks cannot be migrated to a controller that does not support CacheCade.

• Importing a CacheCade drive may result in a RAID 0 VD. You must reconfigure the CacheCade VD

after importing.

• CacheCade virtual disks are not presented to the operating system.

Configuring And Managing CacheCade Virtual Disks

All management applications allow the creation and deletion of CacheCade virtual disks.

The following sections describe the menu options specific to CacheCade virtual disk management and

provide detailed instructions to perform the configuration tasks. The contents of the following section