MSA1000 is sloooooow

[jharrell2]

I have a MSA1000 with 2 enclosures full of 72gb 10k drives (28 drives ultra320) fibre channel is active/passive, there are 2 7port fc switches in the back of the enclosure and the only server attached (dl360 g5 windows 2003 x64) has a hba 2 port emulex.

I'm getting transfer speeds in the 40-80MB/s range. I was going to use this as a backup to disk solution but backing 100gb in 4hours is slower than tape.

Things i've tried:
-Every cache/rebuild priority setting
-every raid type with multiple number of drives
-updated drivers / firmware
-reformatted / downloaded newest drivers
-replaced fiber
-removed 2nd enclosure
-tried each fc link independently
-attached to an identical server
-enabled optimum performance in windows
I think thats all...

I've been on the phone with HP, but they wont troubleshoot performance issues. They did find a drive throwing errors, but i pulled the drive out and no performance gain.

I'm leaning torward a FC issue, perhaps on the switches. I inherited this array and i'm not familiar with hp nor FC.

I've read people having similiar problems, but none had a solution. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

[Eemans Dany · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I could be wrong, but if my info is correct the MSA is SCSI 2 (40 MB/s transfer) max SCSI 3 (80MB/s transfer)in the background, so i dont think a 40-80 MB/s is bad.

Dany

[jharrell2]

That cant be right can it? I ran sandra (b/c i thought my benchmark util may be screwed). It shows my array performs worse than an ata/100 disk??

[jharrell2]

hmmm, i'm looking at sandra again. Its showing my MSA as 3600rpm on the spindles? not sure what thats about.

[Eemans Dany]

hi,

I found a error in my writing.
I stated that an average speed of 40-80 MB/s is bad. But it not bad.
When you have a card, scsi 2 with a max transfer of 40 MB/s or SCSI3 with a maw transfer of 80 MB/s, an average between 40 or 80 MB/s is verry good.

It is not so when plugging disk U320 15 krpm there performing faster. I don believe that you can achief a higher speed than this.

Dany

[jharrell2]

It should be ultra-320 speeds, at minimum ultra3 with a max speed of 160MBs, And of course ultra320 having max of 320MBs. This thing is only 2 years old, its no way ultra2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI

have i totally just lost my mind?

Ok, I just ran the same utility on a dell Scsi array (ultra 320) much older than this MSA. I got 167.5 MB/s, which i a little slow b/c its raid5.

????

[Uwe Zessin]

The MSA1000 / MSA1500 use SmartArray 5 controller technology (it was released in late 2001!) which can negotiate a speed of max. 160 MegaBytes/second. A U320 disk will run at U160 speeds.

If there are U80 disks, the MSA will use that speed when talking to this disk, but it can use higher speeds to faster disks. In other words: it will not "slow down the whole bus". I've seen configurations where one disk was running the old at async. 5 MB/s while all others were running at 160MB/s.

Now, that is the speed during the data-in / data-out SCSI phase. Unless I mix something up, everything else (arbitration, command) runs at asynchronous 5 MegaBytes/second.


Being able to pull 80 MB/sec is a great value - especially if it is against a single logical disk. I've once run a host-based mirror verification with 6 mirrors on two MSA1000 each and got those 80MB/s, too.

[jharrell2]

They're all ultra320 disks @ 10k rpm


If thats true and the controller is 160... Making 80MB/s expected, then this thing is a paper weight to me

[jharrell2]

Ok, back to where we started.
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/11033_na/11033_na.HTML

States: "Performance â The MSA1000 and its components have been designed using the latest industry standard 2 Gb interconnects and Fibre Channel technology. Performance tests indicate a data transmission rate of up to 30,000 IOPS and bandwidth of up to 200 MB per second."

I found this by doing a google search on the part number of one of the controllers (218231-B22)

[Uwe Zessin]

Yawn... If you could see me, you would not see me impressed... as these are just marketing values create with special benchmark programs.

> Performance tests indicate a data transmission rate of up to 30,000 IOPS

The MSA1000 can manage up to 42 disk drives. The slightly younger MSA1500 (which uses the same MSA1000 controller module) can manage up to 56 disk drives.

Let's do a little math:
30,000/42 ~= 715
30,000/56 ~= 535

Do you really expect that a single disk dive can do that many I/Os in a 'real life'?

> and bandwidth of up to 200 MB per second."

Note that it says "bandwidth", not "throughput". The former is the maximum capacity of the data path.