White Papers

PowerEdge Product Group
Direct from
Development
PowerEdge Boot Optimized Storage Solution (BOSS)
Tech Note by:
Jeff Armstrong
Tad Walsh
SUMMARY
Boot Optimized Storage
Solution (BOSS) was
developed in response to
customer needs for a
separate, cost-effective
Hardware RAID (RAID1)
solution for operating system
drives. Customers wanted
separate controllers for OS
drives and data drives on their
server platforms.
The BOSS solution provides
this separate Hardware RAID
functionality for the OS drives
while also freeing up additional
drive slots to be used for ‘data
set’ devices.
BOSS utilizes one or two read-
intensive (Boot Class) M.2
SATA Solid State Devices
(SSDs) which can be used in
pass-thru” or two devices in
Hardware RAID 1 (mirroring).
Available on PowerEdge 14
th
-
generation servers, BOSS is a
robust, redundant, low-cost
solution for boot optimization.
New with Dell EMC PowerEdge 14
th
-generation (14G) servers, the Boot
Optimized Storage Solution (BOSS) comes in response to customer requests
for a simpler, more economical way to segregate operating system and data on
server-internal storage. Many customers, particularly those in the Hyper-
Converged Infrastructure (HCI) arena and those implementing Software Defined
Storage (SDS), prefer to separate their operating system drives from data
drives, and require hardware RAID mirroring (RAID1) for their OS drives. The
main motivation for this is to create a server configuration optimized for
application data. Providing a separate, redundant disk solution for the operating
system enables a more robust, optimized compute platform.
PowerEdge Engineering developed a simple, cost-effective way of meeting this
customer need. The Boot Optimized Storage Solution uses one or two M.2
SATA devices instead of 2.5” SSD drives to house the OS, and utilizes a two-
port SATA Hardware RAID controller chip to provide Hardware RAID 1 and
Pass Through capabilities. The M.2 devices offer the same performance as
2.5” SSD drives, and by consolidating the SSDs and controller chip on a single
PCIe adapter card, the solution frees up an additional drive slot for data needs.
BOSS is available with all PowerEdge 14G servers. Users of 14G servers
wanting to continue to implement PERC RAID controllers and consume two
drive slots can of course do so, but users implementing BOSS will find that it is
a simpler, lower-cost solution performing the same function.
Table 1 below highlights key features of the BOSS:
Table 1: BOSS key features
• One or Two 80mm M.2 SATA devices
• M.2 Devices are Read Intensive 120GB/240GB
• Same Cost & Performance as 2.5”
• Fixed function Hardware RAID 1 (mirroring) or Pass-through
• Single x2 PCIe Gen 2 host interface (x8 connector)
• Dual x1 SATA ports for device interfaces
• Presents single virtualized SATA device to the host
• Half-height / Half-length PCIe adapter module
• Managing BOSS is accomplished with standard, well-known
management tools including OpenManage Systems
Administrator (OMSA) and command line interface (CLI)
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