Intel
®
High Availability Storage User Guide
37
Intel® RAID High Availability Storage SSD Cache Support
The Intel
®
RAID High Availability Storage controller includes support for SSD Cache 1.0, a feature that
uses SAS SSD devices for read caching of frequently accessed read data. When a VD is enabled for the
SSD Cache feature, frequently read data regions of the VD are copied into the SSD when the SSD Cache
algorithm determines the region is a good candidate. When the data region is in the SSD Cache SSD
volume, the firmware can service related reads from the faster access SSD volume instead of the higher
latency hard disk VD. The SSD Cache feature uses a single SSD to service multiple VDs.
The Intel
®
RAID High Availability Storage solution requires the use of SAS SSDs that support SCSI-3
persistent reservations (PR) for SSD Cache VDs. Intel maintains a list of SAS SSD drives that meet the
Intel® RAID High Availability Storage requirements.
NOTE: A SSD Cache VD is not presented to the host operating system, and it does not move to the peer
controller node when a failover occurs. A SSD Cache VD possesses properties that are similar to a VD
with exclusive host access. Therefore, the SSD Cache volume does not cache read I/Os for VDs that
are managed by the peer controller node.
Follow these steps to create a SSD Cache 1.0 VD as part of a Intel
®
RAID High Availability Storage
configuration. The procedure automatically associates the SSD Cache volume with all existing shared
VDs in the configuration. Be sure that one or more SAS SSD drives are already present in the system.
Also, be sure you are using a version of RWC2 that supports Intel® RAID High Availability Storage.
1. In RWC2, open the physical view, right-click the controller, and select
Create SSD Cache - SSD
Caching
, as shown in the following figure.
Figure 28 Creating SSD Cache
