Performance and Recommended Use of AB287A 10 Gigabit Ethernet Cards

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The recommendations mentioned here were followed to achieve the results shown in this
article. Card throughput will be affected with non-recommended configurations.
Please contact an HP representative for additional help in understanding how to best
deploy the AB287.
How We Measured 10 Gigabit Ethernet Efficiency
This article highlights the AB287A throughput. Throughput is the data transfer rate,
or data rate--the amount of time it takes data to move from one place to another. In this
article, it’s shown for one-way transfers as well as two-way. Throughput measures how
well programs run with a certain workload and how quickly user requests can be
handled.
This article also provides the Service Demand for each throughput test. Service
demand is the amount of time (in microseconds) it takes one CPU to handle one kilobyte
of data. It s a normalized measurement because it eliminates disparities due to
differences in the quantities, types, or frequencies of CPUs. Service Demand is an
important capacity planning & performance metric that is sometimes considered when
comparing different server models.
In this paper, the results for service demand are mentioned in text but not shown in
graphs.
The performance results shown in this article were measured with the netperf
benchmarking software.
Tests were run with a single AB287A card in a 2-cell rx7640 with four processors (with
two processors in each cell). The adapter was installed in slot 3.
The December 2005 release of the driver for HP-UX 11i v2, supports multi-queue using
destination port based steering. The driver programs a card resident table to look-up the
destination port of the received packets and directs them to appropriate queues. It
updates the table dynamically as operating conditions change. This feature is supported
only for TCP packets and provides good performance improvement when there is a mix of
applications that do not use the same destination port.
Details of the systems used and the software versions are shown in Table 1. The message
and socket sizes used with netperf for the 10 Gigabit Ethernet transmit, receive, and
bidirectional tests are as follows. At 1500 MTU, the transmit test used a message size
64240 bytes and socket size of 512K. Receive and bi-directional tests used message size
of 64240 bytes, socket size of 256K. At 9000 MTU, all the tests used a message size of
71680 bytes and socket size of 512K.
Performance will vary when this product is used on different systems or software.
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