SAS performance compared to Fibre

[Raymond Brighenti]

Hi,

I'll get straight into it.

We have are developing a product that runs with an Oracle backend.

The machine we're currently running on is a DL380G5 with 8 SAS disks. We're at a stage of needing more space to improve perfomance.

Two options.
Option 1 is to go a P600 and MSA50 or MSA60 with 146Gb 10K disks.

The other suggested is an MSA1000 Starter kit (so PCIE HBA on server) again with 146Gb 10K disks.

Which is going to give the better disk performance Fibre or SAS.

Note - I'm just after disk performance only. I know there's other advantages fibre/SAS and there's tuning of the database but it the disk performance I'm after.

[Peter Mattei · Accepted solution]

First of all you need to know that even the MSA1000 has controllers with FC connections the disks are SCSI.
The advantage of a controller based FC array like the MSA1000 is consolidation!
You can
- access the very same array over SAN from multiple hosts.
- share data in a cluster
- keep spare capacity to be used by any server
- allow good striping over many disks

However, the MSA1000 is based on an older version of the Smart Array controller.
The P600 can deliver more performance than the MSA1000 with the same number of disks!

Still, the number of disks is cruitial for performance.

So if you need the storage for this single server only and want good performance I would go for the P600 with as many drives as possible!

Cheers
Peter

[Raymond Brighenti]

Hi,

Thanks a lot for that, you've confirmed my thoughts.

Ray