DELL 8450 to XP256 - performance issue

[Petr Cerny]

Hi,

I have a customer who has DELL 8450 (Win2k, SP1) connected to XP256 via one Qlogic FC card (QL2200, execution throttle 16, buffer size 2048kB). On XP side, there are 3 LUSE volumes (2 times 36 x Open9, one 4 x Open-9) spread over 4 array groups. We are using "direct" version of QL driver.
We tried performance on NTFS blocksize 512B and 64kB (SQL database is always reading multiple 16kB blocks) - no relevant difference.
The one chance for higher performance is to use software strip over all LUSE volumes (not accepted by customes because of potential problems with striped Win2k volumes recovery ).

Any idea, how to speed it up without sw striping?

many thanks, Petr

[Mark van Silfhout]

Petr,

What hostmode is the XP running for this connection? It schould be:
Q-Logic QLA2202F, QLA2200F, QLA2100F: Mode 00 or 0C (Non-MSCS) Mode 0C (MSCS)

Also it can make a difference if your LUSE is made in disperced mode (but I think you already have done that...)

Regards,

Mark

[Petr Cerny]

Mark,

thanks for reply.
XP is running host mode 00 on ports connected to DELL (as far as I know, there is no difference in performance for hostmodes 00 / 0C).
LUSE volumes are dispersed. To be more specific: all LUSE volumes 36*Open9 are dispersed over 4 array groups.
More info about Qlogic FC card:
QL2200F, driver is QLDirect 7.02.05, firmware 1.61.

Thanks for any hint,
Petr

[Mark van Silfhout]

Peter,

Maybe AutoPath is a solution for you:

HP Auto Path ensures the uptime and availability of Microsoft NT ,Windows 2000 and IBM AIX environments to keep mission critical always available. Also, Auto Path XP automatically increases the performance of these environments though seamless load balancing, thereby effectively allowing data centers to benefit from better uptime and performance from their XP-based solutions.

Regards,

Mark

[Patrick Gorman]

Have you tried NTFS at 48k blocks?

[Mark van Silfhout]

Petr,

Is the bottleneck in the connection to the XP (than Autolun could be a solution), or is the bottleneck within the XP. If so than the ACP would be the most probable cause and adding a second one should speed up things, but is quite expensive ;-)
Also it might be Windows itself slowing things down, but as I'm not too familiar with Windows I would not know how to speed up Win2K or w2k filesystems.

Cheers,

Mark