A SSD Technology a Day (6) – CacheCade

CacheCade is a technology developed by LSI  for its MegaRAID Storage controllers. CacheCade software allows  you to mix inexpensive SATA or even SAS hard disk drives with up to 512GB of solid state storage capacity distributed over a few SSD drives, to to provide a substantial performance boost, 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 is especially best suited  in random read intensive applications where hot data can be moved to SSD storage in order to take advantage of the low latency, High IOPS characteristics of SSD at a reasonable price.
This technology is available on LSI  MegaRAID 9260 and 9280  controller series as well as on re-badged RAID controllers like Dell PERC H700 and H800 with 1GB Cache.

While CacheCade version 1.o offers only read cache (only one supported by DELL) CacheCade 2.o offers read and write caching for impressive results. This technology requires a inexpensive hardware license ($300). Read more about this here

As mentioned earlier Dell also offers the CacheCade 1.0 technology for Dell PERC H700 and H800 controllers with 1 GB NVRAM and firmware version 7.2 or later. This is an excellent solution that combines SSD with regular HDD arrays in order to intelligently store the hot data on 1 or more SSDs (Maximum SSD pool is 512GB).
In their Whitepaper they claim to double the number of transaction using up to 4x50GB SSDs
Read more here:
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/perc-h700-cachecade.pdf
and here on technical details
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/svradmin/6.5/en/OMSS/HTML/ecache.htm