Low disk i/o performance on DL 580 G2

[nishant_sharma_77]

Dear All,

I recently bought 2 refurbished DL 580 G2's on ebay (with 4 x 3.0 GHz Xeon CPU's + 8GB RAM + 4 X 146 GB USCSI HDD's which are configured in a RAID 5 array on a smart array 5i controller with ADG).
The OS on it is windows 2003 enterprise with SP2 and latest critical updates and I used Compaq smart start CD v7.2 to load the OS on it).
These 2 are going to be our primary and standby DB server but the disk I/O on them is ridiculously low at less then 5Mbps (I also have a 2 Dell power edge 6950 servers which has 4CPU's + 8GB mem + 5X 300GB USCSI HDD's) and the disk I/O on them is in access of 150Mbps.
Kindly guide me on how to reconfigure the 2 Proliant DL580's so that the disk I/O improves on both.

Thanks in advance,
Nishant

P.S. This thread has been moevd from General to to ProLiant Servers (ML,DL,SL). - Hp Forum Moderator

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi,

Do you have the BBWC option (Battery Backed Write Cache) installed on the SmartArray controller ?

Without it, or if the battery is dead, you don't get any write cache to the disks, which significantly lowers the performance.

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Rob

[nishant_sharma_77]

Hi Guys,

I upgraded the RAID controller on one of the servers to HP Smart Array 6400 with 192MB RAM and BBWC (installed it in one of the PCI-X slots). Reconfigured RAID 5 + loaded OS
(windows 2003 enterprise with Sp2) using HP smartstart 7.91 and loaded all latest firmware using HP Firmware disk v 7.91. Even now the disk I/O on this server is approx 14Mbps.
I fail to understand what is the bottleneck now.
Another strange problem that has started happening with this controller upgrade is when I restart the system it doesn't come online by itself, I have to manually shut it and then start it manually.
Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Nishant