Performance and Recommended Use of AB290A Combination 2-Port U320 SCSI / 2-Port Gigabit Ethernet Cards

How We Measured GbE and U320 SCSI Efficiency
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How We Measured GbE and U320 SCSI Efficiency
This article highlights the AB290A 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 signals as well as 2-way. Throughput measures how well programs run
with a certain workload and how quickly user requests can be handled.
The performance results shown in this article were measured with the netperf
benchmarking software. Tests were run with one AB290A card residing in slot 7 in a 4-way
HP Integrity rx4640 server. Details of the systems used and the software versions are shown
in Table 1. The Gigabit Ethernet transmit, receive, and bidirectional tests were run using
netperf with a socket size of 128K bytes, a message size of 32K bytes, and a maximum
transmission unit (MTU) size of 1500 bytes. The U320 SCSI read, write, and bidirectional
tests were run using diskbench with a blocksize of 128K bytes.
Performance will vary when this product is used on different systems or software.
NOTES:
• The observed performance results are consistent across all of the same type of I/O slots
of the system.
• The core I/O card in the rx4640 carried minimal site LAN traffic during performance
tests.
Table 1 summarizes the products used to measure the performance:
Table 1 Products Used in the Performance Measurement
Tests
Server Tested
HP Integrity rx4640 Server.
Four 1.5 GHz Itanium2 CPUs
6 MB cache per CPU
Operating System - HP-UX 11i
version 2.0 of September 2004
(B.11.23).
Card Tested AB290A 2-Port U320 SCSI and
2-Port Gigabit Ethernet card
• PCI-X (64-bit, 133 MHz, 3.3v)
• GigE LAN Driver version –
GigEther-01 B.11.23.05
• U320 SCSI Driver version --
SCSIU320-00 B.11.23.01