Dell BOSS card use cases

BOSS cards(Boot Optimized Storage Solution) are a type of card for modern Dell servers which provides mirrorable SSDs for installing the OS on the system without taking up any of the primary drive slots allowing for more drives to go to the data storage raid arrays. 

While these can be used for generally any OS for the system the most common use case is for installing ESXi or other virtualization engines like Xenserver, HyperV, ect. One of the biggest benefits of using a BOSS card for this type of deployment is often times you will use USB drives or SD cards which are often times not redundant which can lead to server downtime if the OS device fails while the system is in use. The ability to mirror the SSDs on the BOSS card gives an extra level of redundancy that may be required depending on your deployment. 

Inherently much more reliable as bootable device than USB or SD cards, theSATA M.2 SSDs are built with much higher quality flash chips which leads to a much more reliable device. 

These cards are very easy to deploy by utilizing the device settings section of the f2 system settings menu reached during the POST process. After the mirror has been setup in the device settings menu the OS is ready to be installed. 

It is extremely useful for things like vSAN deployments as it allows you to free up two internal drive slots allowing for more drive slots to be implemented into the vSAN array leading to more drive space available in the arrays.