Open-E DSS Benchmark with PIC

[tjestr]

Open-E DSS (Target)
------------------------
Server: Industry standard
RAID Controller: Areca 1160 (PCI-X) 1GB cache
RAID Mode: 2x RAID10 (8 HDDs per RAID set) WB enabled
HDD: 16x Barracuda ES.2 SATA 500GB
FC HBA: 2x QLogic QLA2462 (4Gbps)
CPU: 2x AMD Opteron 275
RAM: 16GB
Open-E Version: 5.0.DB49000000.3278 (64Bit)

VMware ESX Host (Initiator)
--------------------------
Server: FSC RX300 S4
FC HBA: 2x Emulex LP1150 (4Gbps)
CPU: 2x Intel E5430
RAM: 32GB
VMware ESX Version: 3.5 Update 3 Enterprise

FC Environment
------------------
FC Switch: 2x EMC 5100
FC GBics: 32x 4G



We've currently 6 Open-E DSS servers and 6 VMware ESX Hosts. Multipathing is disabled.
The VMware ESX Hosts from which I've benchmarked has currently 10 servers running on different Open-E DSS servers. The Open-E DSS Storage where the benchmarked virtual machine was stored, has currently 10 servers running.

[tjestr]

@thx0701: You've tested a file with a size of 8MB. This will be cached by the RAID controller and though your results are not comparable.

@Robotbeat: Same to you. You should test with files 2 to 4 times larger than your RAID controller's cache to get meaningful measurement results.

[tjestr]

I should not blame others if making the same mistakes.
Now I've used 500MB filesize running 8 times.
(= A total of 4GB filesize which means 4 times the RAID controller's cache)

[Robotbeat]

Part of the reason I started doing these benchmarks was because I wanted to see how fast the cache was. If you have 100GB of system RAM and a database less than 100GB, then you can basically cache the whole thing. That's a good idea if performance is way more important than data integrity. Also, eventually the failover will support memory-coherent replication, instead of waiting for the destination side to write to disk. So then you will have data integrity AND performance.