Performance comparisons (JBOD versus Arrays )

[Luis Otavio da Costa]

Hi Folks,

Any of you has a benchmark among ds2405 ou the new ds2500 versus MSA1000 and EVA ?

If not and considering only performance ... what could we estimate for that ?

Regards

[Uwe Zessin]

The DS2405 is a disk drive enclosure while the MSA1000 and EVA are complete storage array with RAID functionality.

How do you define 'performance', by the way?
- MegaBytes per second?
- I/Os per second?
- price per GigaByte?
- ...

[Luis Otavio da Costa]

Thanks in advance .

We think about iops and specially MB/sec .

I Know that the products are differents and to give more details ...we are considering JBOD with MirrorDisk/UX versus MSA or EVA use in the SMB market ... is it clear ?
Regards

[Peter Mattei]

An array like MSA or EVA is built to consolidate storage and ease management.
Due to their caches they can provide higher peak performances than JBODs.

But, if you are looking for storage for a single server you will get much better price/performance with JBODs but without any features like chache, remote replication etc.

At the end of the day if you are lookking for high performance the number of spindles, interfaces (FC/SCS) and HBAs (FC/SCS) is crutial.
As long as you do not hit the ceiling of any component (Array controller, interface, HBA eetc) you will roughly get the same performances with the same amount of disks.

Cheers
Peter

[Alzhy]

Striping Fibre-JBOD disks properly can yield performance the same or even exceeding cache/controller centric arrays. I've benchmarked in the past 4 FC-Enclosures with 8 disks each (with each FC on its own HBA) and it left most of my arrays in the dust. Did this using IOZONE.

I will have to point our though that if you go the route of JBODs - be sure to stripe and mirror (or mirror and stripe) using your host volume manager -- I recommend VxVM as you can have layered volumes and hot-sparing built-in. This is particularly true if your usage of JBODs will be for very write/update intensive applications.

But for general file storage, RAID5 with hot spares should do... BUT A WARNING THOUGH!! - Do not ever set up RAID5's with disks that are large -- i.e. 300GB disks upwards as sparing and parity rebuild can take a long time and double disk failures will certainly be risky...