Slow Disk IO performace on one Proliant server

[Darrenrd]

Hi,
I have (2) Proliant DL580 G2 servers with identical hardware , however when I ran the attached HP disk IO tool one server disk performce is atleast 1/4 of the speed compared to the first server. RAID configs are configure identical Raid 1+0 .. The only differnce I see is the Firware and driver versions.. the server that I'm having the slow IO on has a more recent firmware version.. I was thinking about down grading the friware and driver for the 6400 controller, what do you think.. in addition would there be an issue if I were to downgrade the RAID controller..

Thanks
Darren

[SAKET_5]

Hi Darren,

Disk I/O performance would depend on many factors. I am on a slow dial up connection at the moment, hence couldn't confirm what tools you are using to compare disk I/O performance. Are you using PAT (Performance Assessment Utility) from HP. To get some consistency with your results, you could also use other disk subsystem benchmarking tools such as Nbench and compare your results. Have you tried the common FTP test as well?

What are the key differences in the way your disk volume is defined? Disk fragmentation, MFT fragmentation, free space, number of small files, etc?

Tell us a bit more about it..more than willing to help.

Hope it was of some help and don't forget to assign points:)

Regards,

[SAKET_5]

Hi Darren,

Could you also confirm that the firmware on the drives is latest?

Also, when you say disk performance, how did you measure it i.e. did you test the performance of the raw disk or the OS level logical volume's performance i.e. actual NTFS file system performance?

You could also run CHKDSK, CHKNTFS commands from the Windows end to identify errors with Windows level logical volumes.

Let me know how you went and don't forget to assign points:)

Regards,

[Darrenrd]

Hi, Saket
I'm using HP PAT tool.. in addition on both servers I'm using 64KB as my sec size, driver and firware for the controllers on both server are the same also the firware and the physical size of the drives are the same..the raid controller settings are the same..
I was think about updating the HD firware , but I guess I need to make 15 diskettes this is a bit cumbersome I must say..

-Darren

[SAKET_5]

Hi Darren,

Why do you need to have 15 floppy drives? There are 15 in total firmware floppies, this does not mean you have to create 15 floppies, just pick your model of the drive, look into the readme.txt and find out the number of diskette that contains the firmware image for your disks, for e.g. if your drive model is BD0366453 (i just made this model up), look into readme.txt, you will find that diskette 2 contains the FW for drives model BD0366453. Then run the FW drive creation utilty and skip all other disks creation except 2. This will only require you to have 1 floppy drive.

Give us a shout if anything is unclear.

Hope, you get this message b4 u have used up ur 15 floppies:))

Hope this helps and don't forget to assign points:)

Regards,

[Michael Williams_6]

Further to what Saket said regarding firmware disks, if you are unsure of which model of disk you're using then just create the first floppy, boot into this and it'll tell you which disks you need to create.

All you need do is create the relevant disks and then select refresh disk.