A6826A - PCI-X Dual port 2Gb/s Fibre Channel Adapter Performance Paper for PCI Platforms

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Table Of Contents

A6826A – PCI-X Dual port 2Gb/s Fibre Channel Adapter

Performance Paper for PCI platforms

Table of contents

Introduction...............................................................................................................................................2

Executive summary.....................................................................................................................................2

Test results ................................................................................................................................................3

IOPs .....................................................................................................................................................3

Service demand.....................................................................................................................................3

Throughput............................................................................................................................................4

Scalability .............................................................................................................................................5

System configuration guidelines...................................................................................................................7

Test details................................................................................................................................................8

Products used in testing...........................................................................................................................8

Test configuration...................................................................................................................................9

Additional Information................................................................................................................................9

Summary of content (9 pages)

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A6826A – PCI-X Dual port 2Gb/s Fibre Channel Adapter Performance Paper for PCI platforms Table of contents Introduction...............................................................................................................................................2 Executive summary.....................................................................................................................................2 Test results ..................................................................................
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Introduction This paper provides basic I/O performance and scalability information for the A6826A dual-channel 2Gb Fibre Channel adapter on HP’s PCI platforms. A series of tests were conducted to evaluate the adapter’s performance on HP servers, namely rp5450, rp7400, rp8400 and Superdome. The tests measured the IOPS and throughput of single and multiple adapters. This paper addresses the performance capabilities of A6826A when used with the above mentioned HP platforms.
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Test results Diskbench (db) utility is used to generate the read and write test traffic. Various block size tests were executed for read and write on single and dual ports. The IOPS metric are obtained with 1 KB block size transfers. The throughput metric is obtained with 128 KB block size transfers. The throughput metric is useful in modeling large sequential transfers such as remote backup etc. The IOPS metric is useful in modeling small transactional traffic.
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Throughput Chart 2a : Single and Dual Port Throughput Chart 2b : CPU Utilization for Throughput tests 450 14 350 %CPU utilization Throughput (MB/s) 400 300 250 200 150 100 50 0 1 2 200 400 Read 195.15 390.03 Write 188.13 368.77 2Gb/s FC Therotical Max 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 1 2 Read 6.53 11.54 Write 6.21 12.01 Number of Ports Number of Ports Data obtained on a single cell, single CPU, rp8400 The chart 2a shows the read and write throughput of single and dual ports of A6826A.
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Scalability A series of tests were conducted to evaluate the scalability aspect of A6826A on various HP systems, namely Superdome, rp8400, rp7400 and rp5450.
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Chart 3b: 128 KB Sequential Write 1600 1400 Throughput (MB/s) 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Superdome 188.35 318.93 494.53 600.46 783.03 906.7 1073.9 1183 rp8400 188.21 327.57 507.1 638.67 794.84 882.5 1048.3 1139.1 rp7400 188.6 375.87 557.2 722.77 909.45 1077.6 1255.8 1413.
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System configuration guidelines Superdome To get the throughput and scalability with multiple cards on a Superdome, HP recommends the following: The cells should be configured with a multiple of 8 equal capacity DIMMs to take advantage of memory interleaving. The 8 DIMMs should be evenly distributed across the two busses. Each IO cage of Superdome offers twelve PCI slots, eight 2X and four 4X PCI slots. The 2X slots have 265MB/s bandwidth and 4X PCI slots have 530 MB/s bandwidth.
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Test details The performance results presented in this paper were obtained with A6826A on various HP platforms. The system configurations in the test setup are tabulated in the following table: Products used in testing products used diskbench for performance measurement test rp8400 • 2 cell partition • Each cell with 2 - 750MHz PA-8700 CPUs 4GB System Memory • HP-UX B.11.11 OS • 2Port 2Gig Fibre Channel driver (Ver. B.11.11.
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Test configuration The test configuration consists of 8-way (750 MHz) rp8400 with 8 GB of System memory and four A6826A HBAs. Two HBAs were connected to HP 2Gb/s Fibre Channel switches and the other two were connected to another HP 2Gb/s Fibre Channel switch. Sixteen HP DS2405 were evenly connected to the two switches. The switches were zoned so that each port of A6828A could see 2 DS2405. Similar test setup was used to collect performance data on Superdome, rp8700 and rp5450.