Performance and Recommended Use of AD222A, AD393A, and AD221A PCIe Combination 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel and Gigabit Ethernet Cards

ManualsBrandsHP ManualsNetwork HardwareHP PCI-X 266MHz 10Gb Ethernet SR Multi-OS Card

Performance and Recommended Use of

AD222A, AD393A, AD221A Combination

4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel / Gigabit Ethernet Cards

From Results on an HP rx6600 Server

June 2008

Table of Contents

Introduction .............................................................................................2

Recommended Use Based on Performance and Design ......................4

Performance Summary...........................................................................6

Gigabit Ethernet Only Performance.......................................................7

Fibre Channel Only Performance...........................................................9

1 FC Port and 1 GbE Port Combined Traffic Performance .................11

2 FC Port and 2 GbE Port Combined Traffic Performance .................13

How We Measured GbE and Fibre Channel Efficiency.......................15

Test Setup ..............................................................................................16

Features and Benefits of the AD222A, AD393A, and AD221 ...........17

For More Information ...........................................................................17

Summary of content (18 pages)

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Performance and Recommended Use of AD222A, AD393A, AD221A Combination 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel / Gigabit Ethernet Cards From Results on an HP rx6600 Server June 2008 Table of Contents Introduction .............................................................................................2 Recommended Use Based on Performance and Design ......................4 Performance Summary...........................................................................6 Gigabit Ethernet Only Performance....................
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Introduction This article highlights the excellent performance and high availability of HP’s first generation of PCI Express® based multifunction cards AD221A, AD222A and AD393A. The AD222A (Figure 1) combines 2-ports for 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel mass storage and 2 ports for Gigabit Ethernet (Copper) networking. The AD393A (Figure 2) combines 2 ports for 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel mass storage and 2 ports for Gigabit Ethernet (Fiber) networking.
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Figure 2: AD393A HP PCIe 2p 4-Gbit/s FC and 2p 1000BSX Adptr Figure 3: AD221A HP PCIe 1p 4-Gbit/s FC and 1p 1000BT Adptr 3
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Recommended Use Based on Performance and Design The AD222A can be thought of as a combination of an HP AD355A 2-port 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel card connected by a PCIe to PCIe switch with an AD337A 2-port 1000Base-T card and sharing a common PCIe® bus. All the connections sharing this single common resource perform exceptionally well in a variety of configurations. HP recommends the following usage model to achieve the best performance: • Run the AD222A cards in the highest performing PCIe slots.
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contact an HP representative for additional help in understanding how to best deploy the AD222A, AD393A and AD221A multifunction cards. When used as recommended, the AD222A, AD393A and AD221A provide equivalent performance to the ports on AD355A and AD337A cards. In addition the AD222A or AD393A provides the benefit of high availability (HA) with no additional slot usage.
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Performance Summary The AD222A card provides excellent performance when used in accordance with the recommendations in this paper. Figure 5 summarizes the performance results possible when many different types of traffic combinations are used with the recommended models. Figure 5 : AD222A Performance Summary in rx6600 100.2% 100% Average Percentage of Unidirectional Link Rate 100.0% 99.8% 99.7% 99.6% 99.6% 99.5% 99.4% 99.
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Gigabit Ethernet Only Performance Figure 6 shows the performance results of the Gigabit Ethernet ports using a standard 1500-byte MTU is being run through the card.
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Request-Response tests were also run to demonstrate the capability of how the adapter handles traffic of this nature. TCP Request-Responses tests were run using a request size of 1-byte and a response size of 1-byte. The aggregate number of transactions that could be sustained with a processor per port running close to saturation was captured. Figure 7 below shows the number of transactions per second.
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Fibre Channel Only Performance Figure 8 shows the performance results for the 4-Gb Fibre Channel ports using 256KB sequential read, write, and bi-directional disk traffic being run through the card.
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IOPS tests were also run to demonstrate the capability of the adapter to handle traffic of this nature. IOPS tests were obtained by using a block size of 1KB.
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1 FC Port and 1 GbE Port Combined Traffic Performance Figure 10 shows the performance results when mixed traffic is run simultaneously through one 4-Gb Fibre Channel port and one Gigabit Ethernet port on the AD222A or AD393A or AD221A card.
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bidirectional throughput. This was while continuous, full standard-Ethernet-frame traffic was occurring on the active 1000Base-T port. • The small red bars on each bar show Ethernet traffic achieved link rate on the rx6600 reaching 948 megabits of application data per second for transmit, 947 megabits per second for receive and 1882 bi-directional traffic on the active Gigabit Ethernet port. This was while continuous disk traffic was occurring on the active FC port.
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2 FC Port and 2 GbE Port Combined Traffic Performance Figure 11 shows the performance results when mixed traffic is run simultaneously through two 4-Gb Fibre Channel ports and two Gigabit Ethernet ports on the AD222A or AD393A card.
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bidirectional throughput. This was while continuous, full standard-Ethernet-frame traffic was occurring on the active 1000Base-T port. • The small red bars on each bar show Ethernet traffic achieved link rate on the rx6600 reaching 1895 megabits of application data per second for transmit, 1895 megabits per second for receive and 3768 bi-directional traffic on the active Gigabit Ethernet ports. This was while continuous disk traffic was occurring on the active FC port. .
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How We Measured GbE and Fibre Channel Efficiency This article highlights the AD222A, AD393A and AD221A 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. This article also provides the Service Demand for each throughput test.
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Test Setup Table 3 summarizes products used to measure the performance. Table 3 Products Used in the Performance Measurement Tests Server Tested HP Integrity rx6600 Server. Four 1.6 GHz Itanium2 CPUs 18 MB cache per CPU Operating System - HP-UX 11i version 3.0 of March 2008 (B.11.31.0803).
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Features and Benefits of the AD222A, AD393A and AD221 Features and benefits of the AD222A, AD393A and AD221A include: • The Gigabit Ethernet ports support virtual LANs (VLANs). A Virtual LAN (VLAN) is a logical or virtual network segment that can span multiple physical network segments. VLANs isolate broadcast and multicast traffic by determining which destinations should receive that traffic, thereby making better use of switch and end-station resources.
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