P2000 G3 Performance

[Mike HN]

I just purchased a P2000 G3 FC array with dual controllers, 2x Brocade 8Gb SAN Switches for my c7000 chassis, and QLogic 8 Gb mezz cards for my BL460c G6 servers. I'm running Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft's MPIO.

I connected the array (using four fiber connections for redundancy/IO according to HP's best practices). I configured a 16 drive RAID 10 volume (300 GB 6 Gb SAS drives) and an 8 drive RAID 5 volume (300 GB 6 Gb SAS drives) to gather some benchmark data.

The best performance I can get is about 250 MB/sec copying from my RAID 5 to my RAID 10 volume. That is nowhere near HP's published stats of 790+ MB/sec.

I'm sure I could get somewhat better performance if I bought 15k drives, but not enough to gain 500+ MB/sec. I haven't made many changes other than cofiguring the p2000 ports to "direct" from FC-AL (I didnt notice really any difference.) Has anyone else been able to get better performance by adjusting settings on the p2000 or FC switches? I've looked at http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA0-8279ENW.pdf and my configuration appears to match up with its recommendations. Is 250 MB/sec realistic? Maybe HP's 790-1500+ MB/sec is mostly a marketing blurb?

Thanks,
Mike

[Venkadesh Kannan]

The stats are under testing conditions.
Also, the test was on only copy/thread with a lot of operating system & file system overhead. The same test in a different operating system with different filesystem will give other values.
Simply told, the values are under test conditions & if the same conditions are placed, the values can be achieved.
In real time these values are acceptable. on a single copy, 250MB/s will be realistic. Multiple copies may get around 500MB/sec. 790 may be too ideal to reach.