N-class with A5158A adapter connected to EMC clariion

[john_301]

Dear All,
I'm facing this intresting problem.
old configuration:
N-class machine connected to HP jamaica disk array.

New configuration:

Add A5158A adapter and EMC clariion FC4700 disk array.
After upgrading to fiber channel EMC disk array the machine become very slow and Glance showed the CPU time 100%!!

nothing changed in the application just creating new volumes in EMC and mount it instead of the old volumes! EMC clariion had no errors.

with the old configuration we don't had any performance problems!.

The Swap % and MEM % from Glance is almost the same before and after upgrade.

The driver ver. of the A5158A is B.11.00.10 and the system is running HPUX 11.0 and upgraded to the lates patches.

Did anybody face this problem before?
any help pls.

[Chris Vail]

We had Clariion 4500's, but traded them in for Symmetrix systems for exactly this kind of reason. They are blindingly fast, but can't handle high data volumes.

I note that you have only a single 5158a. This is the problem. At the very minimum get a second one, and get a license of EMC's PowerPath software. You should probably also get a Brocade or McData/EMC fiber switch, and connect both controllers on the Clariion, and both 5158a's to the switch. Powerpath will then balance the load between the controllers and the Clariions.

One thing that will help a lot is to lower the number of fiber channel requests. This is the fcms_max parameter in the kernal. By default, this is set to 2048. Drop this to 256 if you have only 1 5158a, and 128 if you have 2. This is the number of fiber channel requests in use at a time. The Clariions will work better when being asked to do fewer things at one time. I think they need to upgrade the processor speeds in their controllers.

I've attached a PowerPoint presentation I wrote last year to describe to management the problems we were having with our Clariions, and some suggestions on how to fix it. The EMC Reps DON'T LIKE THIS!

[Martha Mueller]

Chris,

I read with great interest your post about the problems you were having with the clariion. We have had our share of problems, too. I would love to be able to see the powerpoint presentation that you attached, but I don't seem to be able to open it. Would you try again?

thanks