Multi-port NIC performance

[Jerry Eckert]

Does anyone know where I can find performance data (throughput, etc.) on DE50x and DE60x NICs? Either specs or practical experience will be helpful.

Specifically I am looking for:

(a) DE500-AA vs. DE500-BA vs. DE500-XA

(b) DE502 vs. DE500 and DE602 vs. DE600 (one port only).

(c) Impact of simultaneous use of both ports of a DE502 or DE602 vs using one port on each of two NICs.

(d) Same as (c) for four ports on the DE504-AA or DE602-BB+TA

(e) Performance of the DS10 on-board interfaces vs. PCI cards.

Thanks in advance.

Jerry

[Richard Whalen]

We recently had a customer asking a similar question and received the following answer from VMS engineering, that answers some, but not all of your questions (our customer was asking about ES40 and ES45 systems):

"EIDRIVER for the Intel 10/100 82558 and 82559 chips is relatively
efficient. The host interface to the hardware is not very good.

EW5700 for the Broadcom 10/100/1000 BCM57xx chips is slightly more
efficient than EIDRIVER. The host interface to the hardware is pretty
good. The hardware itself is much faster than the Intel 10/100.

:

The bottom line is that EW/DEGXA is far superior to EI/DE602 in all
respects at any speed/duplex mode, with any application, on any system,
in any configuration."

[Volker Halle]

Jerry,

the information you're asking for is most likely only available from the LAN engineers in OpenVMS engineering.

You can still come to the OpenVMS Technical Bootcamp in Nashua, NH starting 20-MAY-2007, there are still some free slots. Then you could talk to the LAN engineers in person and obtain answers to your questions.

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/symposium/index.html

Volker.

[Jerry Eckert]

Thanks for the response, Rich and Volker.

Rich, did the response you received give any indication of the relative performance of the DE500 and DE600 series cards? I interpret the reference to EW devices in the material you quoted as applying to DEGXA only. Or am I reading this too narrowly?

The application is presently running on DS10 processors using the internal NICs and DE500-XA and -AA cards. For redundancy, I am looking at using LAN failover, which requires DE600, DEGXA, or DEGPA NICs. The limited number of PCI slots on the DS10 forces me to use multiport devices. As far as I know, the DEGxA devices are single port, which narrows my choices down do the DE602. If the DE602 performance is comparable to the on-board EW ports in the DS10 or the DE500-AA I should be OK.

Volker, as much as I'd love to come back to Nashua (are Lui Lui and the Giant of Siam still open?), I can't get the time away from work at this point. Critical projects, tight schedules... The usual fire drills.

[Hein van den Heuvel]

>> (are Lui Lui and the Giant of Siam still open?),

Ayup, as well as many other fine establishments: Martha's, Fody's, Michael Timoty, Villa Banca, Del Vaudo's, Tokyo, La Caretta, South of the Border, Margarita's, Shorty's, Lilac Blossom (now 2nd location close to the Tara), Chen Yang Li, India Palace, You You's, and the usual slew of chain restaurants.

Gone (for a while): Ming Garden, Osaka Tea garden, Indian Village (new owner), Grainery, Ciro, Charman


As for your problem it, it might help specify the minimum requirements to fullfill.
What is the current observed load in packets/sec and-or mb/sec?
The DS10 has limited processing and IO capacity and would have a hard time driving a Gb Nic at full load whilest still doing any useful work.

fwiw,
Hein.

[Jerry Eckert]

Thanks for your suggestion, Hein.

The sole application running on these systems is an I/O front-end processor. It receives data from the Internet (IP) and transfers it to the second level FEPs via DECnet. The only processing is that required to move the data (and, of course, typical system overhead).

Unfortunately, the application records statistics only for connections; there are no traffic based statistics available. I can collect DECnet information using MONITOR, but I don't know of an equivalent tool for IP traffic. I may end up writing something to periodically sample the device counters. This is why I was looking for comparative information on the NICs.

[Volker Halle]

Jerry,

to collect performance data for your existing LAN interfaces and TCPIP (and the overall system performance) consider using T4.

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/products/t4/

or see Steve Liemans page:

http://www.trendsthatmatter.com/

T4 has data collectors for the LAN interface counters [NET.ewx] for each interface and overall TCP data [NET.TCP] like packets/sec and Rx/Tx MB/sec.

Volker.

[Volker Halle]

Jerry,

depending on your OpenVMS version, LAN failover is also supported on DE500-BA and DE504-BA as listed in V8.2 System Mgr Manual Vol. 2.

The DE500-BA is also supported as a LAN failover device with VMS732_LAN-V0300 or higher.

Volker.

[Richard Whalen]

Jerry,

The response that we got didn't compare the DE500 vs. the DE600.

Rich