What is Boot Optimized Storage Solution (BOSS)?

07.07.2020 19,390 20

Martin Pramatarov

You’ve probably come across Boot Optimized Storage Solution or BOSS somewhere on the Internet. It is a solution from Dell that was designed to separate the OS on a different physical drive. The goal is redundancy and performance, but how does it work?

What is BOSS?

Dell developed its BOSS (Boot Optimized Storage Solution) for the line of servers called Dell PowerEdge. The idea behind it was to create a hardware RAID (read what is RAID here), the RAID 1 configuration, on a budget.

RAID 1 is a very simple RAID configuration that makes a complete mirror of a drive. It does not increase performance, but it serves as a backup.
Dell provides this mirroring for the drive where the OS is installed. If something happens to the OS drive, there is a backup that continues operating without any problems.

And, if you choose a BOSS module with two slots for drives, they will support hot-plug. That means that if one of the drives fails, you can swap it without shutting down the system and without experiencing any downtime. As soon as you put in the new drive, it will start to copy the information from the other one, and you will have two copies of the OS again.

The desire and demand for such a product came from consumers, who wanted a separate hardware controller for that purpose.

This is a common desire of companies that implement SDS – Software-Defined Storage and those with HCI – Hyper-Converged Infrastructure. It is good for application data.

What is HCI (Hyper-converged Infrastructure)?

Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI) is a complete software-defined IT virtualized infrastructure of all the elements of a traditional hardware-defined system. The HCI will include at least a hypervisor (virtualized computing), software-defined storage (SAN), and software-defined networking (virtualized networking). In such a configuration, the Boot Optimized Storage Solution can add a lot of value by providing an easy redundancy method at an affordable price. You can keep all the drives of the system for application data and have a separate mini module for the OS.

Are there other options instead of Boot Optimized Storage Solution (BOSS)?

Of course, you can use a USB stick or SD card for the same purpose, but you won’t be able to benefit from the redundancy that BOSS provides you. In case of a failure, if you are using a USB stick or SD card, you will experience downtime. The chance of failure is much higher because the quality of the memory chips of the flash memory is muchlower. They are not produced with servers in mind, so it is normal to have less durable memory chips.

What Boot Optimized Storage Solution (BOSS) options are there?

No matter which generation of BOSS you choose, BOSS-S1, BOOS-S2, or BOOS-N1, there are two options – one with one read-intensive M.2 slot for SSD, and another one with two slots. The second is used for RAID 1, to completely mirror the OS drive, and the first serves as a separation for the OS.
Even if you choose the first option, which allows you only to separate the OS on a dedicated SSD, there is an important benefit, to freeing up maximum available drive slots for data. Since the last gen, the N1, you can also use a single drive in RAID 0 to improve the performance.
Think of it as an extra mini drive that uses the internal space of the server and does not require additional space.
In the case of RAID 1 BOSS, you will have a fail-proof system. In case of an SSD failure, you can hot-plug a new drive, and the system won’t experience any downtime.

There are three BOSS solutions out there:
• BOSS-S1
• BOSS-S2
• BOSS-N1

BOSS-S1
This is the original system that Dell offered with 120GB and 240GB options. For those who want to use Windows, the larger drive is recommended. For Linux distribution usually 120GB is enough for the OS.
Later, the manufacturer increased the capacity to 240 GB or 480 GB.

A benefit of this solution is that it does not occupy another drive slot, but instead it uses a PCIe slot. It is a PCIe adapter card.

Dell BOSS is a good and economical solution. It supports Windows Server 2012 R2, 2016 and 2019, Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9-8.0, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server version 12 SP3, 15, 15SP1, Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04, and VMware ESXi 6.0 Update 3-6.7.

You can use BOSS-S1 adapter card on the following Dell systems: PowerEdge C4140, PowerEdge C6525, PowerEdge R240, PowerEdge R340, PowerEdge R440, PowerEdge R540, PowerEdge R640, PowerEdge R740, PowerEdge R740xd, PowerEdge R940, PowerEdge R6415, PowerEdge R7415, PowerEdge R7425, PowerEdge R6515, PowerEdge R6525, PowerEdge R7515, PowerEdge R7525, PowerEdge T140, PowerEdge T340, PowerEdge T440, PowerEdge T640

You can use BOSS-S1 modular card on the following Dell systems: PowerEdge C6420, PowerEdge FC640, PowerEdge M640 (for M1000e), PowerEdge M640 (for VRTX), PowerEdge MX840c, PowerEdge MX740c

BOSS-S2
The BOSS-S2 offers 1 or 2 M.2 80mm Enterprise Class Sata SSD drives with a hot-plug support. What’s new here is the secure method to update the firmware. The method uses cryptography to provide secure updates to lower the risk of hackers’ attacks (read about the types of hackers here).

The BOSS-S2 SSDs’ capacities are 240 GB or 480 GB.
The component works with management tools like iDRAC, OpenMangae Systems Administrator (OBSA), and Command Line Interface (CLI).

The drive types that BOSS-S2 uses are 2 x 6 Gbps M.2 SATA SSDs, and the connector is PCIe Gen 2. The drive models are Intel M.2 S4510 and Micron M.2 5300.

You can find BOSS-2 in PowerEdge R6525 and PowerEdge R7525 systems.

BOSS-N1
This is the newest BOSS solution by Dell and it comes with a big upgrade. BOSS-N1 supports NVMe M.2 with PCIe Gen3 x4 host interface. It supports Dual NVMe Gen3 x2 device interfaces. That can improve the speed significantly.
We must mention that now you can use RAID 0 with a single RAID 0 drive. RAID 0, or striping does not add redundancy or fault tolerance, but it can increase the speed. It reduces the size of the SSD but adds performance.
Another difference is the Stripe size is now double, and it supports 128 K stripe size only.

The BOSS-N1 SSDs’ capacities are 480 GB and 960 GB. The drive models are SK Hynix PE8010 and Micron 7400.

You can use BOSS-N1 with the following operating systems: Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2022, RHEL 8.6, SLES 15 SP4, Ubuntu 20.04.4, ESXi 7.0 U3, and ESXi 8.0

Pros and Cons of Boot Optimized Storage Solution (BOSS)

+It is a reliable system
+Notifications when a disk fails
+BOSS is simple to map
+Hot-plug support
+SMART info about the drives
-No battery support
-No auto-switch to the second drive in case of failure.
-Limited monitoring

Conclusion

Boot Optimized Storage Solution by Dell is a really simple solution that can help you with your HCI. It is far better than booting the OS from a USB stick or an SD card. The redundancy and the hot-plug capability make BOSS a great advantage of Dell systems.
It is simple, yet it works.