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Re: EVA4000 throughput

 
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Delrish
Trusted Contributor

EVA4000 throughput

Hi Everybody,

As you know on EVA 4000 there are 4 Host ports. Each of them can connect with a 2 Gb/s connection to a SAN switch. So what does HP say EVA 4000 can handle 350 MB/s throughput? How can I test it?

Alireza
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Vincent Fleming
Honored Contributor

Re: EVA4000 throughput

HP has pretty realistic published performance #'s. Many of our competitors will tell you that their array with 4 2GB FC ports will do 800MB/s.

Bullcookies.

Sustained throughput is different than bus speeds.

You can test the performance with some performance testing software and a large configuration. We typically test with as many drives as the array can handle, and usually in RAID1. Of course, you'll need several fast servers.

Regards,

Vince
No matter where you go, there you are.
Delrish
Trusted Contributor

Re: EVA4000 throughput

Thank you,
It seems I did not explain clear. I mean as long as we have 2 Gb/s connection we cannot get 350 MB/s. How did HP test it?

Alireza
Uwe Zessin
Honored Contributor

Re: EVA4000 throughput

The EVA4000 has 4 front-end ports, each 200 MegaBytes/second bandwidth. And it has two back-end ports, each 200 MegaBytes/second bandwidth, too.


350/4 = 87.5 MegaBytes/second throughput per port.
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Delrish
Trusted Contributor

Re: EVA4000 throughput

Let├в s talk about it some more, I create a LUN on EVA4000, It has 4 ports, So my server will find it through 4 different paths. For example in HP-UX, OS detects it as 4 different disks (for example c6t0d0,c7t0d0,c8t0d0,c9t0d0). All of the other servers will detect this LUN as 4 Disks with the same name, too. If there are 10 servers that are connected to this EVA and all of them have to access this shared LUN,(like as Oracle RAC) how should I balance the load between 4 EVA├в s ports? If I use just c6t0d0 disk, all the traffic will go through a port and another ports will be ideal and I/O will be my bottleneck. What is the solution for this case?
Uwe Zessin
Honored Contributor

Re: EVA4000 throughput

Let's get the terminology right...
You don't create a LUN, you create a virtual disk. The virtual disk is then mapped to the SCSI LUN address space of each defined host when you 'present' it. You normally have 4 paths, so there are 4 different SCSI LUNs to access a single virtual disk.


It is important to understand that on every EVA (3000/4000/5000/6000/8000) a single virtual disk is managed by one of the controllers at a time - a different virtual disk, of course, can be managed by the other controller.

On the new EVAs (4000/6000/8000) you can do I/O through the non-managing controller as well, but there is a performance loss, because the data need to be re-routed over the mirror ports to the managing controller. It is not a great deal for write I/Os, because the data is usually sent anyway to go into the mirror cache, but the read I/Os will create additional traffic.

The paths through the managing controller are called the performance paths and I recommend that you only use them. That will give you two paths with 200 MegaBytes/second - should be OK, because the EVA4000 has two back-end loops with 200 MegaBytes/second anyway.


In most cases you are dealing with multiple virtual disks. You should divide them over both controllers so that you have some kind of load sharing and can make efficient use of all 4 paths.
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Delrish
Trusted Contributor

Re: EVA4000 throughput

Thank you very much for the explanation,
I want to setup an enormous Oracle RAC system. I need I/O bandwidth as much as possible. I would rather to use all 350MB/s capacity of EVA4000. According to Oracle 10g documentation, I need just one disk (LUN or anything else that is existed in EVA environment) for storing my data (we will use new Oracle ASM technology instead of old RAW portions as a shared storage). I/O capacity is very important for our DBA and because of that we want to buy EVA. We will use EVA 2C1D configuration. What is your solution for this case?
Any kind of experience and help are highly appreciated
Uwe Zessin
Honored Contributor

Re: EVA4000 throughput

Honestly,
I am a bit skeptical that you will be able to get 350MB/s with an EVA4000 2C1D, because it has only 14 disk drives. Each drive would have to be able to run with almost 200 IOPS to be able to deliver that much data.

The chunk size is 128KB, so:
350,000,000 / 14 / 128,000 = 195.3125
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Delrish
Trusted Contributor

Re: EVA4000 throughput

Ok, so we must use more enclosures in EVA. However my question about load balancing between 4 host ports is still existed? If I have as much as needed enclosures and HDDs, Is there a solution for the case mentioned in my previous post?
Basil Vizgin
Honored Contributor

Re: EVA4000 throughput

I think, you must create at least 2 LUN and divide Oracle data into 2 parts to store on this LUNs. As I know Oracle supports such approach.
Than bind first LUN for one EVA controller, second--to another.