Well, I think if you wanted to go ZIL for your SLOG, then a DC3700 would have been a better choice. Although the OWC PCIe SSD is very intriguing.
Agreed. But I was buying a boot drive at the time. I've used the S3700s in other projects and they are very very nice SSD drives esp for work loads that write a lot, PCIe is probably the only way to move up from them in a big way. For a SLOG only device I'd love to benchmark a STEC 840Z, it's a 16GB SAS SSD purpose built ZIL device. Paper spec wise it looks to be a step down from a ZuesRAM device though, of course it's cheaper so you'd expect it to be so. Problem with all the paper specs is none of them use block sizes close to what ZFS uses when it writes out data to the ZIL.
On more thing to chew on:
Mirror config(12 arrays of 2 disks):
STEC Only in JBOD unit: 287MB/s
Intel Only: 134 MB/s
sync=disabled(for fun only): 642MB/s
local(async): 399MB/s
This is the exact same hardware and config setup I bench marked above, the only change is I'm using a Ubuntu based setup(this pains me greatly to write but at the end of the day I need stability & throughput for my VMs). If I go down this road it will be mid summer at the earliest before I would move this from testing and into production. My gut reaction is that they've tuned ZFS differently and/or are writing to my STEC in a move optimized fashion.
As a final note I've setup and bench marked just about every ZFS appliance in the past week as a virtual SAN and I'll say all the Solaris based ones performed inline with FN. In fact total package/experience wise FN kicked the tar out of the Solaris based ones. FN was the only appliance that didn't include drivers for vmxnet3 which I found interesting.
Edit:
Added stats for using the Intel only above. Going to try a firmware upgrade on the STEC and then retest under FN.