HP-UX Auto Port Aggregation - support for 10GigE?

[Jyotinath Ganguly]

Today HP-UX Auto Port Aggregation s/w supports 10, 100 1000BaseT; is the roadmap for 10GigE suport known?

[Luk Vandenbussche · Accepted solution]

Hi, it is supported, you see it in table 1-2 on the link below

http://docs.hp.com/en/J4240-90035/J4240-90035.pdf

[rick jones]

Are you looking for > 10 Gbit/s under a single IP, or are you looking for the HA aspects of APA?

BTW, what is your performance expectation with 10G?

[Jyotinath Ganguly]

Customer is looking for > 10 Gbit/s under a single IP, and > 1 Gbit/s sustained bandwidth.

Would IP over Infiniband be a good option for Enterprise (Insurance) applications using Integrity + HP-UX + Oracle Db + WebSphere stack?

[rick jones]

> 10 Gbit/s under a single IP is "interesting" what sort of system are we talking about?

You say Oracle and DB and such, that tends to mean small packets. In _very_ broad handwaving terms, 10Gig, just like 1 Gig and 100BT before do nothing to make transfer of data any easier on the host - it takes just as many compute cycles to send a packet over 10G as it does 1G or 100BT or 10BT.

Now, there are specifics of the various NICs which make things better - for example, the 1G NICs offer ChecKsum Offload (CKO) and "Large Send" (UX calls it VMTU) support, along with interrupt coalescing, which makes the specific NIC _implementation_ better than the 100BT. It also offers JumboFrame, but unless you can get some tcpdump/tusc traces showing sends > 1460 bytes, that may not really matter much in this case.

The 10G NIC (AB287A) continues/builds-upon that by offering multiple queues, so it can take advantage of multiple CPUs.

BTW, the AB287A is a PCI-X 1.0 card, which means 133 MHz on the PCI-X bus, which means that total bandwidth through the card, no matter how much CPU is behind it, is limited to 7.X Gbit/s, and there may be system-specific limits beyond that.

And just because I'm paranoid :) you do know that under APA, it is the _aggregate_ which is increased, not necessarily a single connection?

IP over IB - I'm not all that familiar with the IB cards. My understanding is they do not offer CKO. I would want to benchmark with say netperf configured with parms to simulate the expected workload.