My Review of Running Filemaker Pro Server 11 w/SSDs

[Peter Payne]

Hi, long time user of Filemaker Pro (I started with a "dummies" book right when version 3.0 came out, the first relational version), and I've really loved using the program all these years. It's actually made it enjoyable to work with data and run my business.

I've posted here before about running Filemaker Server 11 on SSDs, since SSDs are pretty much the most interesting thing to come along in computing since multicore processors. I have been told by smarter users here (people who do Filemaker for a living) that I was crazy to consider it, that SSDs were an "unknown" and no one should be running them on Filemaker server applications. I decided to take the risk anyway, and here is my review of a Filemaker Server computer running from SSDs.

The Filemaker server I set up was Windows 7, since I had licenses available, and didn't want to learn the complexities of running a server flavor of Windows. It was a new Windows machine I got BTO so I could choose a chipset that supported SATA III drives on the motherboard. (Apple might have made a Mac Pro sale but their total failure to update this machine to support the needs of its customers with technologies like SATA III has been shameful.) I was careful to set up the Windows install to be as SSD friendly as possible, turning off cache files that might wear the SSD down unnecessarily.

The PC has two hard drives and I installed two Vertex 3 SSDs (the 240 GB size is supposedly better than the 120 GB ones). We are running the Windows OS on SSD A, with SSD B being used for the Filemaker files only, then we have two hard drives which allows the main system SSD to be backed up to hard drive every night. The other hard drive is another Windows install that we can fall back to in case something breaks.

Performance is out of this world, way better than we thought we'd get. Before if I wanted to find this year's calendars i would search for "2012 calendar" and then sort them to get the ones I wanted (the ones with the most recent dates). Now that searching and sorting are so fast I can be more lazy, searching for just "calendar" and running the same sort, knowing that it will work through the 2000+ calendars we've sold over the past 15 years and bring the ones I want to the top in my sort. Everyone at our company is happy, and no is even aware that there is a server hosting our data, which is as it should be, it seems to me.

Backups when we ran off the 2006-era Mac Pro were agonizingly slow before, causing everyone to get frustrated especially when a backup would start, especially around Christmas when we are really busy. They took around 2-3 minutes without verification, or 10 minutes with. Now backups happen from the data SSD (with nothing on it but our main Filemaker files) to the system OS SSD (which has Windows and the lastest 4-5 backups of the database on it) and take about 10 seconds for our entire 5+ GB folder of databases. Another program backs up the backup folder from that SSD to one of the hard drives, which is a separate process from Filemaker so there's no slowness visible to the users.

I know that SSDs are a new thing and am sure there will be some problems in the future. I had one of the Vertex SSDs die on me suddenly, bricked as solid as you like, while running on another machine, and we had to have the company replace it. It remains to be seen whether the consumer level Vertex SSDs are good enough for our needs, and I'll report back here if we think they're not for some reason. Enterprise-level SSDs would obviously be better, and if there are any that have the raw speed and high IOPS of this drive, you should consider that in any you plan to deploy. Personally I've been impressed with the 240 GB SSDs from OWC (http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other+World+Computing/SSDMX240/) and plan to buy these in the future, rather than the Vertex units.

Well, thanks for reading. If you have any advice for me or questions, let me know.

[MHaynes]

Excellent post, Peter, and quite timely for helping me decide on some new hardware to run FM Pro Server 11. Thank you.

[Vaughan]

Thanks Peter, great report.

The concern that the "smarter users" have about SSD is twofold: firstly they are new and their performance under a wide range of conditions is unknown. While this may be considered on-school conservatism, it is is important because when delivering systems to clients the performance and stability is a major criteria, and because they are new we cannot say "I've been running these for X years..." because they haven't been around for X years.

Secondly, the earlier generations of SSDs had issues of performance degradation as they age. This may have been overcome, I dunno.

So keep us posted every six months for the next couple of years. :-D

[Peter Payne]

True. Delivering a system where your professional face was at stake would be different from me taking a chance on a couple SSDs and seeing how we like them. I think they'll be great overall, unless the drives themselves fail more than a comparable hard drive. I had the one fail so I know they do obviously. As for degradation of speed, my unscientific estimation from a Intel 160 GB SSD is, things will slow down 20-30% then latten out, which is still way better than we'd see from fast (and loud) hard drives.

[BrentHedden]

For what it's worth -

My company was performing some comparison tests with running a large solution with FMS on SSDs versus a SAN (configured as RAID5) about a year ago. The results were very negligible, as the SSD was slightly faster, but not enough to make enough of a real difference. In the end, we decided to go with the SAN, because we were familiar with the configuration and knew the reliability of a SAN.

We are using a SSD as a backup drive to test for longevity. We've got an offsite backup as well, so it's not a loss if the SSD fail for whatever reason. So far we've had zero problems with the drive.

[IdealData]

SAN v SSD? Not really a fair comparison. It would have been fairer to compare a RAID 5 SAN of SSDs

So, a single SSD managed to fend off the brute force of a RAID 5 SAN.

Yep, I've got FMS running on SSD!

[Vaughan]

True. Delivering a system where your professional face was at stake would be different from me taking a chance on a couple SSDs and seeing how we like them.

Which is why I am ALWAYS happy to see people like you doing the hard yards out on the bleeding edge. :D

[Simon Brown]

I read an interesting analysis of SSD's in server environments (ArsTechnica?) and it had an interesting point to consider: when SSD drives fail, they can do so very suddenly and without warning. Additionally, recovering any data from a bad SSD can be much harder. Reliability issues should mostly be an issue of the past, and now are, at the least, least somewhat better than a spinning disk drive, but there hasn't been enough time yet to say this definitively.

Upshot is, you probably want to RAID a pair or more of SSD's, and/or be extra careful with your backups.

Simon.