On Fri, Aug 11, 2000 at 04:34:48PM -0500, Jim Moechnig wrote:
> > Depends on the application, of course, but I've been surprised
> > many times in the past when I thought for sure the Netapp would not be
> > able to keep up. I have a 4x450-MHz E420R with a VxVM RAID-0 device,
> > spread over 16 50GB 7200 rpm drives on two U2SCSI buses. The server
> > also has a Gigabit Ethernet connection to an F740 with one shelf of
> > 36GB 10000 rpm drives (5 data, 1 parity, 1 spare). The local
> > filesystem is vxfs, mounted with delaylog and the largest allowable
> > log area.
>
> If I'm reading this correctly, you're using all software raid for
> the DAS side, correct? I would be very interested in seeing a
> similar comparison with a hardware raid controller, as this would
> offload all the raid overhead from the host cpus to a subsystem
> better optimized to handle it. This would also unfortunately
> introduce a lot more variables of the sort Alan Yoder pointed out,
> as I'm sure the performance under load of the various available raid
> controllers is far from uniform.
I don't have hard numbers, but when we moved our Oracle database from
direct-attached A1000 (dedicated diff. SCSI controler) to a filer we
saw a large join that used to take 3 hours drop to 20 minutes, and
overall database performance increase perceptably. We're very happy
with the Filer's ability to handle large numbers of simultaneous
reads/writes. Your milage may vary if you're doing single-threaded
reading or writing.
Certainly key is using GigE to connect the Filer to the server. Also,
keep in mind that the more disks you put in the Oracle volume, the
better your performance. We almost made the mistake of breaking our
volumes up into 3-disk sets until our NetApp OEM told us what the
performance impact would be.
-- Aaron Sherman Systems Architect HighWired.com -- The global high school community http://www.highwired.com300 North Beacon Street Watertown, MA 02472 (617) 926-1850 x238 (617) 926-1861 fax asherman@highwired-inc.com / ICQ#43677395 / Y!ajstrader
"We had some good machines, but they don't work no more." -"Faded Flowers" / Shriekback
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