Help - anyone with an Intel 910 400GB who can download the bare Intel firmware (not the intel pkg)

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Stilez

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(Crossposted to STH forums)

I have a server with an LSI 9211-IT HBA, Intel 910 SSD, and Chelsio NIC. I was updating the HBA firmware. As usual I checked no other RAID/HBA/LSI cards in the machine, so I flashed the HBA.

It now turns out that the Intel 910 uses the same chip internally - although there was no warning or way to know this in advance - and the LSI updater without warning 'helpfully' detected the Intel SSD and flashed it to LSI firmware as well. Thanks a lot LSI.

I can't directly flash the SSD back to Intel firmware using Intel's SSD updater/toolkit, because it thinks the card has newer firmware (I've downgraded to P15 and it still thinks that). Also Intel only supplies their firmware pre-packaged in their toolkit, you can't get it "bare" as a rom/bin image. I also doubt either company will help (Intel will say "not our fault" and LSI will be unlikely to be able to help on an Intel product).

One possible route back is that if LSI's sas2flash program can grab the firmware off an LSI controller or flash new firmware to one, it can probably also grab and reflash the genuine Intel firmware from one 910 to another.

So this is a plea for help - is there anyone out there who has an Intel 910 400GB card, and can use LSI's "sas2flash" program to get the entire firmware (rom, bin, nvram, etc) from it, and send it to me?

It should be 100% safe, the worst it can be is if sas2flash for some reason could write it on mine, but not read it on someone else's.

Anyone able to help - thank you!!
 

Dice

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That is .... :o
 

Stilez

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Yes. However, that is... now fixed! :D (Thank you for the expression of sympathy. It was appreciated even if not much could be done)

LSI were about as helpful as a pair of earlobes on a microwave oven. (I was told verbally that in effect nobody would give a **** enough to do anything). By contrast and completely unexpectedly, Intel took technical details and without any argument they offered to allow it as replaceable under warranty - I just got the RMA by email, which means a nice shiny working 910 is going to arrive here soon. I've asked them to kick LSI's backside internally as well, if they can :)

Which means I now have a second - rather more pleasant dilemma.....

I have also been offered an affordable option on a Zeus RAM 8GB (Z4RZF3D-8UC). As the ZIL will mainly be used for handling ESXi snapshots over a 10G connection, am I better to stay with the Intel 910 (NVMe SAS 6g (LSI 2008) based, 400GB, 65 usec write latency) or switch to a ZeusRAM (SAS 6g, only 8GB, but specs say 24 usec write latency)?

I'm not sure whether or not the latency stats include the "end to end" latency of the underlying transport (NVMe LSI2008-based and SAS via an LSI 9211 HBA?) and in any case 8GB sounds a bit small for the use - the '910 would be guaranteed large enough but for ZIL it's down to pure write latency and consistency (+data protection which both have) and not much else. Also I'm not experienced in the exact details of hardware behaviour to expect and how it might play out.

It's so nice to have an unexpectedly pleasant resolution to a problem, and a nicer problem to replace it.

Which should I go with for the ZIL, now that I have a choice? :)
 
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Ericloewe

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Intel 910 (NVMe
It predates NVMe by several years. As we've seen, it's actually an LSI SAS2 device, using the mps driver.
I'm not sure whether or not the latency stats include the "end to end" latency of the underlying transport (NVMe and apparently SAS via an LSI 9211 HBA?)
Again, it's not NVMe. It's going to be LSI's driver and the SCSI stack. It would probably have higher latency than NVMe.
ZeusRAM (only 8GB
That might be enough, depends on the scenario.
 
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Stilez

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Thanks - I've corrected the post to not confuse anyone else (one is a pure SAS 6g device, the other uses a SAS 6g chip internally via a SAS driver).

I'm figuring there are two possible bottlenecks that affect the choice of SLOG:

  1. Maxing out a dedicated ESXi 10G connection will give a transaction group size around 1.2GB x 5 sec = 6GB (so needing 12 - 15GB total). So if all else is equal an 8GB ZIL wouldn't be adequate - fast for a bit then slow as molasses when it's full.

    But that's only true if the server can actually write that fast to the device:

  2. SSDs generally have an IOPS limit that greatly limits their total bandwidth when handling a stream of small writes. While the ESXi and 10G side could be capable of sending 1.2GB/sec writes, it could be that the write load to the ZIL breaks this up into 1-4KB chunks, in which case neither of the SSDs can handle it faster than a few hundred MB/sec. This in turn greatly reduces the transaction group size in practice (because the bottleneck is the natural speed limit of the SSD for 1-4k writes), which in turn makes the ZeusRAM sensible again if it's got lower latency.
Is this about right?

If so, do you have any instinctive feel for how the Intel 910 and ZeusRAM 8GB might compare as SLOG for ESXi?
 
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