DL380 MSA1000 Fiber I/O Implementation

[Jennn]

Does anyone tried to use the fiber optic connection rather than the typical UTP/copper cables?

How great it can affect the performance coz we are planning to have fiber optic network in the office?

Please help. Thanks..

[James Muell]

Are you talking about the connection to the MSA1000 disks? or using FibOp Network Adaptors in the hosts? More details about your configuration would be helpful.

[Jennn]

Hi James,

Yes, I'm planning to use the fiber adapters so as to support fiber optic cabling system. Is this possible?

At the moment, the MSA1000 acts as a file server and users are accessing this via 1.0Gbps CAT6 and is operating at a very poor read/write perfomance.

To sum it up, thinking that fiber optics can help speed up the server's performance so we're looking into its impact on MSA1000.

Hope you can help us. Thank you so much.

Thanks,
Jen

[Stephen Kebbell]

Hi,

I don't think that will have much of an effect. The MSA1000 itself has no LAN connectivity. There must be a fileserver which is connected to the MSA. The fileserver has a fibre-channel connection to the MSA1000 (probably a 2Gbit/s SAN connection). The bottleneck is probably either the disk configuration or cache settings (or that the MSA is not the fastest box around). I doubt the LAN is the bottleneck.

Regards,
Stephen

[Jennn]

Hi Stephen,

Sorry I forgot to mention that MSA was connected to a DL380 server. =)
The server is equipped with QLogic Fiber Channel adapter which we're planning to adapt with the fiber network. Honestly, I don't know much of fiber networks. Does it also works like copper/UTP LANs? Can it still use MS Clustering?

I actually do think that it is the RAID6 (ADG) config of the disks are the major cause and perhaps the fiber optics can help speed up a bit. Do you have any thought on this?

Thank you so much..

[Stephen Kebbell]

Hi Jen,

the qlogic adapter is a fibre-optic based adapter, and is not connected to your LAN. Either it connceted directly to the MSA, or via a SAN switch, which is all fibre-optic cabling. Changing your LAN cabling to fibre optics will have no effect on your slow performance.
RAID6 (ADG) is rather slow, that's one area you could work on. But I don't know if you can migrate from ADG to RAID5 online, without data loss.

Regards,
Stephen

[Jennn]

You're a great help Stephen! Thanks a lot..

So, if we want the server be connected to the LAN then will have to install new fiber adapters right and accessing files from it will be faster?

With regards to migrating to RAID5 online, is not possible without data loss. I really can't believe that RAID6 is extremely slow when it comes to read/write performance.

[Stephen Kebbell · Accepted solution]

Hi,

if you want the server connected to the fibre-optc LAN, then you will need an extra fibre-optic LAN Adapter (e.g. HP's NC310F)
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/networking/nc310f/index.html

However, I doubt you will get any significant performance gain from that. Check the utilisation of the Network Adapter on the DL380, and see if it is under any strain. If it really is a problem, then maybe network teaming with load balancing might help, but I still think the bottleneck is the MSA1000, or how it configured.
RAID-6 uses two parity segments for every "stripe" it writes. The RAID controller needs to perform several calculations for each write request. For read, it should not be that bad, but for write, especially sequetial writes, performance is not great. Also it depends on how many disks you have in your array. How many disks are in the MSA, and how are they configured. Also check how your cache is set up. Default is 50% read / 50% write, but you can adjust this.

Regards,
Stephen