Gigabit Ethernet Cards

How We Measured GbE and Fibre Channel Efficiency

This article highlights the AD194A and AD193A 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 netperf4

benchmarking software. Tests were run with one AD194A card residing in slot 3 in an

8-way HP Integrity rx6600 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 netperf4 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 netperf4 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 rx6600 carried minimal site LAN traffic during performance

tests.

• The line rate for GbE is 1.25gbps, removing the 8b/10b encoding overhead yields

1Gbps un-encoded payload. The line rate for 4Gb FC is 4.25Gbps, removing the

8b/10b encoding overhead yields 3.4Gbps un-encoded payload. The total full-duplex

un-encoded payload is therefore 6.8Gbps(FC)+2Gbps(GigE) = 8.8gbps.

Table 1 summarizes the products used to measure the performance: