High performance Disk arrays and 2Gb/s SAN

[Delrish]

Hi Everybody

What is the benefit of a high performance Disk array (like EVA 8000) when you should connect it to a 2Gb or 4Gb SAN Switch?
For example, there is a san switch and Disk array connect to it, also there are 4 servers that are connected to SAN too.Now the bottleneck is disk array connection to SAN. All the servers should share 2 Gb/s connection to array! It means each server has a connection of 512Mb/s to server! EVA8000 support 1300MB/s on sequential reads. How can we test it?Please advice.

Alireza

[Steven Clementi · Accepted solution]

Alireza:

Technically, the EVA has 8 2GB links to the SAN that can be load balanced and/or utilized seperately.

So with 4 servers, each server could potentiall have a dedicated path. 8 Servers could have a dedicated path.

After that, there will have to be some sharing, but that is where load balancing comes in. Also, the links are hardly ever fully utilized unless your doing some really heavy i/o ALL the tie.


Steven

[Uwe Zessin]

Most servers are not bandwidth-bound. What they need is I/Os, I/Os and I/Os. In that case you can safely 'overcommit' an array's port.