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Re: Monitoring throughput to the tape drives

 
Oleg Zieaev_1
Regular Advisor

Monitoring throughput to the tape drives

Hi.
Is there a way to monitor throughput of tape drives going from the server to LTO library ?
in SUN we use iostat -xtcnz {time}, were time is usually set to 5-10 sec.
Should be some utility from the HBA itself as well ?

Thanks
Professionals will prevail ...
7 REPLIES 7
Nigel Poulton
Respected Contributor

Re: Monitoring throughput to the tape drives

Hi Oleg,

As youve not specified too many details its a little hard to offer advice. However, most SAN switches offer decent performance counters for throughput on switch ports.

From the command line you can normally watch throughput at given intervals (usually nice and short) and from a GUI you can normally graph throughput and see spikes and lows....

Hope this helps
Talk about the XP and EVA @ http://blog.nigelpoulton.com
Oleg Zieaev_1
Regular Advisor

Re: Monitoring throughput to the tape drives

This is true, we can monitor via switch itself.
Still, I need to run command on the box to see how much data I push to those drives.
HP-UX 11.11 library is IBM, drives are LTO3.

tape 29 0/12/0/1.98.15.255.1.3.0 atdd CLAIMED DEVICE IBM ULT3580-TD2
/dev/rmt/29m /dev/rmt/c45t3d0BEST /dev/rmt/s16m
/dev/rmt/29mb /dev/rmt/c45t3d0BESTb /dev/rmt/s16mb
/dev/rmt/29mn /dev/rmt/c45t3d0BESTn /dev/rmt/s16mn
/dev/rmt/29mnb /dev/rmt/c45t3d0BESTnb /dev/rmt/s16mnb
ext_bus 48 0/12/0/1.98.16.255.1 fcd_vbus CLAIMED INTERFACE FCP Device Interface
target 22 0/12/0/1.98.16.255.1.3 tgt CLAIMED DEVICE
tape 12 0/12/0/1.98.16.255.1.3.0 atdd CLAIMED DEVICE IBM ULT3580-TD2
/dev/rmt/12m /dev/rmt/c48t3d0BEST /dev/rmt/s17m
/dev/rmt/12mb /dev/rmt/c48t3d0BESTb /dev/rmt/s17mb
/dev/rmt/12mn /dev/rmt/c48t3d0BESTn /dev/rmt/s17mn
/dev/rmt/12mnb /dev/rmt/c48t3d0BESTnb /dev/rmt/s17mnb
Professionals will prevail ...
Leif Halvarsson_2
Honored Contributor

Re: Monitoring throughput to the tape drives

Hi,

Strange enough there is no easy way to mesure tape throughput in HP-UX. Glance may be one idea but, perhaps not very easy. There has also been rumours about some enhancements in sar.
You can find some information in this thread:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1009939
krusty
Honored Contributor

Re: Monitoring throughput to the tape drives

Hi Oleg,

HP has a website you might find helpful to troubleshoot your problem. It has programs to see how fast your host can source data (HPReadData) and how fast your tape drive can sink data (HPTapePerf). Both can be used on both Windows and Unix platforms and can be quite helpful in giving you some baselines for performance. See if this helps you:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=lpg50460&locale=en_US#N10564

Cheers,

Curt

"In Vino Veritas"
Richard Bickers
Trusted Contributor

Re: Monitoring throughput to the tape drives

You can use HP's LTT to measure possible data rates to/from the system and to/from the drives using the performance tests. It's important to separate these two when troubleshooting - as it's usually the system that's the bottleneck. Note thes are the same tests as HPReadData etc as they were integrated directly into the tool.

You can get LTT free from www.hp.com/support/tapetools.

Note it doesn't run on Solaris - I saw the mention of Sun...

If you're interested in more general monitoring rather than troubleshooting - and since you're using HP's LTO - then you can pull a support ticket after a backup and look at the performance data in there. That will tell you reasonably accurately what the drive thought the native data rate was.

Due to a slight anomaly in the drive logs it's actually better to unload the tape first and look at the performance of the previous tape. Slightly odd but that's worth doing.

While you're there you'll find quite a lot of other useful information in the ticket. I'd be interested in feedback on that as this 'report' style ticket is a recent feature.

For example if you look at the margin of the data on the tape it'll tell you just how good your backup when - not just pass/fail.

Note you get a little more info on the tape side if you are using HP media too.

Regards, Richard (LTT)
It's more interesting when it's gone wrong
Oleg Zieaev_1
Regular Advisor

Re: Monitoring throughput to the tape drives

Yep, the tools referred on the page are good for initial testing but not for monitoring of running backup stream.

Do we have smth to monitor a running backup?
Without introducing new file copy to backup drive etc ?

Here is what I see in iostat on Solaris:
extended device statistics
r/s w/s kr/s kw/s wait actv wsvc_t asvc_t %w %b device
0.0 0.2 0.0 9.6 0.0 0.0 21.6 15.9 0 0 d3
0.0 5.4 0.0 5.9 0.0 0.2 0.4 29.4 0 2 d5
0.0 0.2 0.0 9.6 0.0 0.0 0.0 12.8 0 0 d13
0.0 5.4 0.0 5.9 0.0 0.2 0.0 28.5 0 2 d15
0.0 0.2 0.0 9.6 0.0 0.0 0.0 15.8 0 0 d23
0.0 5.4 0.0 5.9 0.0 0.2 0.0 29.4 0 2 d25
0.0 5.4 0.0 5.9 0.0 0.1 5.2 24.1 1 2 c1t8d0
0.0 0.4 0.0 9.7 0.0 0.0 0.0 12.2 0 0 c1t0d0
0.0 1.6 0.0 10.3 0.0 0.0 0.0 11.1 0 1 c1t1d0
0.0 5.4 0.0 5.9 0.0 0.1 4.8 23.7 1 2 c1t2d0
116.0 0.0 118785.4 0.0 0.0 1.0 0.1 8.3 1 96 rmt/15
0.0 63.0 0.0 64512.7 0.0 0.7 0.1 11.2 1 71 rmt/16
0.0 62.6 0.0 64103.1 0.0 0.7 0.1 11.9 1 74 rmt/43
63.2 0.0 64717.5 0.0 0.0 1.0 0.1 15.4 1 97 rmt/49
62.8 0.0 64307.9 0.0 0.0 1.0 0.1 15.5 1 97 rmt/52

Professionals will prevail ...
Oleg Zieaev_1
Regular Advisor

Re: Monitoring throughput to the tape drives

So, does anybody know if I can download tools provided by tape library vendors certified to work with HP-UX and monitor tape drives activity then ?
Looks like out of the box tools are not there yet. Recommended tools above assume you do it in your test environment and dedicate drives to the test.
I need to monitor ongoing backup without impacting its performance too much.
All we need is KB/s throughput. :)
Professionals will prevail ...