Performance and Recommended Use of AB465A Combination 2-Port 2-Gb Fibre Channel / 2-Port Gigabit Ethernet Cards

How We Measured GbE and Fibre Channel Efficiency

This article highlights the AB465A 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 AB465A 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 Fibre Channel 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 AB465A 2-Port 2 Gigabit Fibre

Channel and 2-Port Gigabit Ethernet

card

• PCI-X (64-bit, 133 MHz, 3.3v)

• GigE LAN Driver version –

GigEther-01 B.11.23.05

• Fibre Channel Driver version --

FibrChanl-01 B.11.23.01