Adaptec MaxIQ: Flash SSDs Boost RAID Performance

Conclusion

With MaxIQ, Adaptec doesn’t offer a revolutionary product to the business storage market, but it manages to combine proven caching technology with a high-performance flash SSD in an effort to accelerate existing systems at an affordable cost. Although the effective I/O performance level may vary and often cannot reach individual SSD performance, the MaxIQ approach is strikingly conclusive and very easy to implement. It introduces a few of the benefits offered by SSDs without touching your storage strategy.

Adaptec's marketing claims that the MaxIQ package is able to deliver up to 5x performance boosts. We do see instances where this holds true, but only if the RAID volume capacity is limited to less than the flash SSD’s capacity. However, arrays larger than the cache capacity may still contribute to overall performance, as Adaptec can actually read cached “hot” data from the SSD and simultaneously deliver uncached “cold” data from the array.

Effective I/O performance gains for applications that are primarily dependent on read operations will be anywhere from 15% to 45% if the RAID volume is several times larger than the cache. This alone is worth the $1,295 investment because such an increase in I/O performance would otherwise require many additional disk drives you might not want or need. Needless to say, these would also increase power requirements, the chance of a drive failure, and probably even require the transformation of an existing RAID array across all available drives. Going for a single SSD is, of course, not an option, since you would lose redundancy. Only the minimum of three X25-E SSDs at 32GB for a RAID 5 would provide redundancy. The sacrifice there would be much smaller capacities than you might already be using and lots of additional cost.

We’ve also seen performance benefits of 2x and greater in a few cases, which is more than you can reach through tacking on additional mechanical hard drives. Adaptec’s solution does a great job at lifting RAID storage performance to levels at which existing storage solutions can, in fact, be refreshed for another few years of operation.