SA 6404 on DL 380 G3 + SMA 30

[Hannes Piirsalu]

We bought in last week SMA 30 disk array, 6 x 300gb 10k u320 discs and SA 6404 controller for heavily loaded public FTP server. Before that we used VA 7410 as storage, but this solution was BAD - VA doesnt give any read performance - 30MB/s max. We need ~60-70MB/s.
So...we installed SA 6404 in the DL 380 G3 and disabled original SA 5i onboard controller. Now servers internal discs and external discs are connected to the 6404. Max speed we so far are able to reach is 55MB/s (400-450 Mb/s). Server is running Redhat Enterprise 3 EL with HP CCISS driver and etc. Ethernet cannot be the bottleneck, because its a 1Gb ethernet and served from EMC data to FTP up to 80MB/s. But we cannot use this solution anymore. So we decided to build local storage for this ftp server. Anyone here has experience with SCSI discs max read speed? There is 6 x 72GB 15k U320 discs in RAID0 mode with reiserFS containing data for FTP. With those 300Gb discs max read speed was ca 30MB/s (250-270 Mb/s). Are we at the end or is there are possible to gain more speed? I have read here more posts about same problem, but no actual numbers about max speed.

[Vincent Fleming]

Can you please tell us - do you have 6 x 300GB drives, or 6 x 72GB drives or both??

What is the max data rate you get using "dd" locally on the machine? ie: dd if=testfile bs=16k of=/dev/null

Run the "dd" with no load on the server, please.

cheers,

Vince

[Hannes Piirsalu]

Sorry, that I did not mentioned this before :) Write now we have 6x72gb 15k U320 discs in RAID0 mode running as FTP storage. And max data rate is about 50MB/s. We gained also 55MB/s for a short time. Also tried with 2x300gb discs in RAID0 mode and then max data rate was 30MB/s. Iowait was then ca 90% average.
Fleming: Here is the output of command You requested:
dd if=/var/log/vsftpd.log bs=16k of=/dev/null
83375+1 records in
83375+1 records out