Ultrium 960 performance lower than Ultrium 230

[Magesh G]

Hi ,

I had upgraded to HP Ultrium 960 external tape drive from my existing Ultrium 230 drive , which is conneceted to an Ultra 2 Scsi Controller in HP RP5430 server .

The Problem now is the Speed of back has been highly degraded .
for eg: Earlier i used to complete the back in about 9 hours for about 400 GB of data in Ultrium 230 but now it is taking around 14 hours in Ultrium 960 .

Can any one say where is the bottle neck ??

Pls help !!

Thanks & Regards,
Magesh

[Kenan Erdey]

hi;

400 GB in 9 hours? it's too much. Ultrium 960 supports LTO3 cartridges which can be written up to 160MB/s. if you were using windows i would say you restart some services. but in unix i don't know.

[VCP2005]

It is not easy to get LTO3 or Ultrium960 fully perform in 80MB/s.

the slow performance may cause by disk or file type. This can verify by using HPReaddata

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?locale=en_US〈=English+%28US%29&basePartNum=COL3285&locBasepartNum=co-11017-1&os=Microsoft+Windows+2000+Pro&tech=Utility&pnameOID=238682

PLease verify urserver resources beside disk performance.

by the way what disk /RAID you are using ?

[Magesh G]

Im worrie d about the degradation of the back up speed after upgradation .

Is that because the Ultrium 960 is connected to the Ultra 2 SCSI connecter ??

why is ultrium 960 taking more time when compared to that of Ultrium 230 ??

Will this problem be solved if i connect the drive to a Ultra 320 SCSI controller card ??

Pls advice !!

[Richard Bickers]

Your data rate seems to have dropped from 12MB/S to around 8MB/S.

An LTO 2 is capable of 30MB/S *after* compression (i.e. 60MB/S at 2:1 compressing data) and an LTO 3 is capable of 80MB/S *after* compression. Your figures are some way off these.

The bottleneck is usually the disk IO but it's odd that the LTO 3 is slower than the LTO 2. It may be there's some issue with the SCSI negotiation. You should really be using U320 HBAs and cables for LTO 3 but your LTO 2 stuff should still work...

As mentioned before you can use HPReadData to measure the speed of the disk IO. We normally recommend LTT (diagnostic tool) as it includes these performance tools too. You can get it from www.hp.com/support/tapetools.

Use the device performance test to find out how fast your drive/cable/HBA can go independent of your disk IO and use the system performance test to measure the speed of your disk IO. There is online help if you get stuck - or just post a question.

Another good place to look is the support ticket from LTT. Just click on the heart icon and LTT will pull the logs from the drive. Take a look at the drive configuration->interface. That will tell you what SCSI rate has been negotiated.

Also, the drive health will give you an overall summary. Have a look through - there's a lot of useful data in that report. Select 'more details' level of detail for all of it.

[Magesh G]

Hi,

Can any one tell me how do i execute a performance test in my HP RP5430 server ,
(OS : HP Unix 11.0 ) for testing this Ultrium 960 drive ?

Note :

HP RP 5430 server is conneceted to an EMC Storage ( Clarion CX 400 ) .

RAID 5 is configured .

Backup speed has further degraded and is now taking around 24 hours for 400 GB of data .

Ultrium 960 is connected to Ultra 2 SCSI
( CORE I/O ) in Slot 0 of the HP RP5430 Server .

Pls help


Regards,
Magesh

[LTT Team · Accepted solution]

Hello Magesh,

To run the Performance test from LTT, you will have to first install LTT on your machine. You can download LTT from www.hp.com and then install it in your HPUX machine. At the moment we support LTT on HPUX 11.x.

After you install LTT please run it by executing the command ./hp_ltt

After LTT starts up you will have to do a hardware scan and then select the LTO 3 drive.

After this at the command prompt you will have to execute "devperf" and this will show the options of running the performance test.

You can get LTT from the link
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DriverDownload.jsp?pnameOID=406731&locale=en_US&taskId=135&prodSeriesId=406729&prodTypeId=12169

You can get the LTT user manual from the location:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DocumentIndex.jsp?locale=en_US&taskId=101&docIndexId=179911&contentType=SupportManual&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=406729

Please see the section "Drive Performance Test" in the user manual and this will give your more details on this test.

Hope this help.

Thanks,
Srivathsan