Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
5 Posts
0
9101
April 28th, 2008 14:00
AX150 / PowerEdge 2950 Performance Tuning Tips / Best Practices.
We have a small Server Farm connected to a new AX150 with a total of 4TB of SATA Storage. We have just bought the 150 online and tied a PowerEdge 2950 Dual Quad Core w/ 16GB Ram to it and have one of our SQL DBA's doing some high performance SQL testing on it. He is reporting mediorcre disk I/O out the the 1TB SAN LUN that is allocated to his project. The LUN is one of 4 on the system at present and the RAW 750GB SATA disks are configured in RAID 5 mode across all 8 disk spindles. There is essentially no other load on the system at present.
We have done no other performance tuning of the server or SAN and will like to find some good info sources and tuning tips and best practices or performance tuning both the SAN and the 2950 Server to work optimally with each other.
We suspect there is disk cache tuning that needs to be done but need to know where we start first.
Any guidance would be appreciated.
Phil
Checkfree Corp
0 events found
Dev Mgr
6 Operator
•
9.3K Posts
0
April 28th, 2008 16:00
So I'd start with raid 10 and if you still aren't getting enough performance for your needs, look at an AX4-5 and get it with SAS (e.g. 300GB 15k) drives instead of SATA drives (SAS drives aren't an option on the AX150). Or if you really want serious performance, look at a CX3-series system.
Phil_Lewis
5 Posts
0
April 29th, 2008 13:00
Unfortunately due to our mixed use environment we are currently setup for Raid 5 across all 8 spindles in the AX150 array its not the best but we do not have the luxury presently to change the configuration to Raid 10.
I agree with you too that if we want true high performance, then we will need to look at a CX3-20
Our DBA who is using a 1 TB LUN at present is reporting poor results from the AX150 testing with SQL I/O to measure rudimentary disk I/O performance and is seeing 900 64K Block Random Reads per second and only about 400 writes. When compared to a NexSAN system running the same test we see 8000 reads and 2000 writes per second.
We have no control in the O/S over caching parameters as they are all disabled and have yet to explore options in Powerpath. I'm new to this aspect of tuning, there is much to learn and little time to learn it, as much as anything I'm learning what I need to learn.
If there is a way to make the AX150 perform better then I need to find it ;)
Phil
Checkfree
Dev Mgr
6 Operator
•
9.3K Posts
0
April 29th, 2008 14:00
Phil_Lewis
5 Posts
0
April 29th, 2008 14:00
The NexSan SATABOY is a 14 Drive SATA Box. entry Level Design 2 GB Fiber and iSCSI. http://www.nexsan.com/sataboy.php
When we bought the AX15 at the beginning of the year our plans were and are to support a Virtual Server Farm. No sooner was the SAN Commisssioned than along came Our DBA's who wanted to model a huge performant Database and SQL database partitioning schema. We reconfigured our SAN to get them a TB of space and now the DBA's are complaining that the AX150 is not performant. "Well Duh guys!!! We didn't buy the AX150 for its blistering data delivery capabilities, but rather for the ability to readily store and deliver Virtual Servers in our lab".
I realize expectations for the AX150 SAN are out of line with its abilities and intended use but I want to be certain the AX150 and its attached servers are properly configured to provide the best possible performance in its current configuration under the current circumstances. It feels like we have a significant bottleneck that we need to be sure is not a config issue. If the AX150 is going as fast as it can then so be it but I need to know what and how to tune the system to be sure its at its best.
Phil