A6826A - PCI-X Dual Channel 2Gb/s Fibre Channel Adapter Performance Paper for Integrity Servers

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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 Itanium-based Integrity servers. A series of tests were conducted to evaluate the
adapter’s performance on rx2600, rx4640, rx7620, rx8620 and HP Integrity Superdome servers. The tests
measured the IOPs and throughput of single and multiple adapters.
This paper addresses the performance capabilities of the A6826A adapter when used with the above mentioned
HP Integrity servers. This paper also discusses system setup considerations necessary to obtain the maximum
possible performance from A6826A adapters installed in these servers.
This paper focuses on the following topics:
• Test results: Single and multiple adapter performance data, including IOPs and throughput for a
single port and dual ports, will be discussed.
• Scalability: Multiple adapter scalability tests on rx2600, rx4640, rx7620, rx8620 and Integrity
Superdome systems will be discussed.
• System configuration guidelines: rx2600, rx4640, rx7620, rx8620 and Integrity Superdome
system configurations and recommendations will be discussed.
• Test details: The HP products used, the test setup, and the benchmark tool used, will be discussed.
Executive summary
A6826A adapters installed in HP Itanium-based Integrity servers offer an excellent SAN solution. The A6826A
adapter provides read throughput of 195MB/s, and write throughput of 186MB/s on a single port running at
2Gb/s. With both ports running at 2Gb/s, a read throughput of 390MB/s, and a write throughput of 372MB/s
is achieved.
A6826A performance summary
single port dual ports
Operation
read write bd* read write bd*
IOPs 35180 20619 26187 70032 41221 52414
achieved 195 186 370 390 372 720
throughput
(MB/s)
% of 2Gb/s FC
theoretical max
98 93 92.5 97.5 93 90
NOTE:
*bd: Bidirectional Operation
The above performance data was obtained by installing an A6826A adapter in a PCI-X 133MHz slot (Slot 8) of
an rx4640 server.
An A6826A adapter installed in a PCI-X slot of an rx4640 server offers excellent bi-directional performance. A
single A6826A port running at 2Gb/s provides bi-directional throughout of 370MB/s and both A6826A ports
running at 2Gb/s provide bi-directional throughout of 720MB/s with linear scaling.
On other Integrity servers the A6826A adapter provides outstanding performance with linear scaling for up to 4
adapters when all eight ports are being used at 2Gb/s bandwidth. Additional adapters may be added to provide
greater connectivity.