AB379B - PCI-X Dual Channel 4Gb/s Fibre Channel Adapter Performance Paper for Integrity Servers

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AB379B – PCI-X Dual Channel 4Gb/s Fibre Channel Adapter

Table of contents

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

Executive summary...............................................................................................................................2

Test results..........................................................................................................................................3

I/Os Per Second (IOPS) ....................................................................................................................3

Service Demand ..............................................................................................................................4

Throughput .....................................................................................................................................5

Scalability.......................................................................................................................................6

System configuration guidelines .............................................................................................................7

Products used in testing.....................................................................................................................8

Test configuration.............................................................................................................................9

Additional Information........................................................................................................................10

Performance

Paper for Integrity Servers

November

2006

Summary of content (10 pages)

PAGE 1
AB379B – PCI-X Dual Channel 4Gb/s Fibre Channel Adapter Performance Paper for Integrity Servers November 2006 Table of contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 2 Executive summary............................................................................................................................... 2 Test results........................................................................
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Introduction This paper provides basic I/O performance and scalability information for the AB379B dual-channel 4Gb Fibre Channel adapters on HP Integrity servers. A series of tests were conducted to evaluate the adapter’s performance on the rx6600 and sx2000 Integrity Superdome servers. The tests measured the number of I/Os per second (IOPS) and throughput (MegaBytes/second) of single and multiple adapters. The percentage CPU1 utilized during the tests was also measured.
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On the sx2000 Superdome Integrity servers the AB379B provides outstanding performance with linear scaling up to 6 adapters, when all twelve ports are being used at 4Gb/s bandwidth. Additional adapters may be added to provide greater connectivity. Test results The performance data presented in this paper was obtained using the diskbench I/O benchmarking utility. Various block size tests were executed for read and write and bidirectional traffic on single and dual ports.
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Service Demand Service demand is the amount of CPU utilized per megabyte of data transferred. This metric is measured for small size I/O operations because large size I/Os by their nature have very small service demand. AB379B offers low CPU service demand for small size I/O operations. To measure service demand of the AB379B, sequential read and write operations of 1K, 4KB and 8KB I/O sizes were performed on the 8-way rx6600 system.
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Throughput AB379B offers excellent throughput capabilities with large size I/O operations. Service demand is the amount of CPU utilized per megabyte of data transferred. To measure throughput of the AB379B, 256KB sequential read and write operations were performed on the 8-way rx6600 system. Chart 2a: Single and Dual Port Throughput Chart 2b: CPU Utilization for Throughput tests 2.4 1600 2.2 1400 2.0 1.8 1.6 1.4 1000 % CPU Utilization* (10^6 bytes/sec) Throughput – MB/s 1200 800 600 400 1.2 1.
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Scalability A series of tests were conducted to evaluate the throughput scalability of the AB379B on the HP Integrity sx2000 Superdome server.
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System configuration guidelines rx6600 The rx6600, with Montecito processors, offers up to 8 processor cores (4 dual-core processor modules), with 2 PCI-X 266 MHz slots, 2 PCI-X 133 MHz slots, and 4 PCI-X 66 MHz slots. HP recommends that the AB379B be installed in one of the 266 Mhz slots (physical slot numbers 3 or 4) to achieve the performance shown in this paper.
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Test details The performance results presented in this paper were obtained with AB379B2 on HP Integrity servers.
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Test configuration The scalability test configuration consisted of a 16-way Integrity Superdome sx2000, each processor running at 1600 MHz, with 64 GB of system memory and six AB379B HBAs. Three HBAs were connected to one of the two HP 4Gb/s Fibre Channel switches, and the other three AB379Bs were connected to the other HP 4Gb/s Fibre Channel switch. Fifteen HP MSA1500 Fibre Channel disk arrays were connected to each of the two switches, for a total of 30 MSA1500s.
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Additional Information For more information about AB379B please visit http://www.hp.com/products1/serverconnectivity/storagesnf2/index.html. For more information about HP’s integrity servers please visit http://www.hp.com/products1/servers/integrity/index.html © 2006 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.