MSA 1000 Write Performance Problems

[James Hokes]

Hello,

We are running MSSQL 2000 on Windows 2003 server with an MSA1000 SAN unit.

Lately, the performance has been abysmal, and we ran the gamut of tests and config tweaks on the OS and SQL side. Next, we got hold of Atto benchmark utility, and found the following:

On most RAID 5 arrays in our data center, we get between 20-60MB/s write performance when using Direct I/O (no cache). On the MSA1000, we get 2 MB/s. This is obviously awful, and we feel it is killing our performance.

We've got 9 SCSI drives in the box; 1 on RAID 0 for backups, and the other 8 as part of one large RAID 5. The 8 are divided up 4 on one backplane and 4 on the other. The drives are 72.8 GB each.

Any help would be appreciated, as we would like to get vastly better than 2 MB/s write performance.

Thanks,
James Hokes