Datasheet

ServeRAID M5000 Series Performance Accelerator Key for IBM System x 9
MegaRAID CacheCade
MegaRAID CacheCade software allows customers to blend inexpensive SATA or SAS hard disk drives
(HDDs) with a small amount of solid state storage capacity to provide a substantial performance boost
while avoiding complete 1:1 replacement of SATA HDDs with faster SAS HDDs, adding additional SATA
HDDs or moving to an all-SSD RAID volume to achieve performance requirements. This combination of
HDDs and SSDs as secondary cache helps improve IOPs per dollar, particularly in random read-intensive
applications. Simply select an SSD and associate it with one or more virtual drives to configure and use
CacheCade software.
How CacheCade works
Certain applications access different data sectors more frequently than other data sectors. By determining
which data is accessed more frequently, it is possible to move the more frequently accessed data to a
faster media, allowing for faster overall READ performance from the controller. CacheCade software
allows for frequently read data (hot-spot) to be moved to second-tier SSD cache for much faster retrieval
of that data when it is time for it to be re-read. This provides significant performance improvement of 2x to
50x for read-intensive applications such as web, file, SQL, and other transactional server applications
Figure 8. CacheCade in action
Enabling CacheCade
Once the Performance Accelerator Key is connected to the M5000 Series Controller, CacheCade can be
configured through the MegaRAID Storage Manager Utility. When configuring for CacheCade, it is
necessary to make sure that no volume data be stored on the available SSDs prior to creating the SSD
cache.
Performance impact
CacheCade uses SSDs to super-swell the M5000 Series controller cache. As with any other SSD caching
implementation, the amount of performance improvement that is achieved differs depending on the