white papers on performance for DMX

I'm not aware of any white papers.  I'm not sure what you would want to know.  Do you want to know the maximum performance for a given IO workload?  Do you want to know what knobs are available and how to tweek them?  Or maybe some other question?

I would start by collecting STP (Symmetrix Trends of Performance) data and use STPNavigator or Performance View to look at the data.  STP can be collected by any host running Solutions Enabler 6.4 or above.

Do you want to know the maximum performance for a given IO workload? Yes

  Do you want to know what knobs are available and how to tweek them?  Yes

Also is there any way if I can find if a particular set of FA ports are over loaded? and how do I analyze the port statistics etc?

Also How many IOPS do we get for a disk drive depending on the rpm and size of the disk?

I would start by collecting STP (Symmetrix Trends of Performance) data and use STPNavigator or Performance View to look at the data.  STP can be collected by any host running Solutions Enabler 6.4 or above. Also can you let me know how do I need to collect STP data?

There are so many numbers that depend on read, write, hit, miss, sequential, random, and size of the IO that it would be impossible to discuss here.  I would suggest you find out who on the local account team is a Symmetrix SPEED guru and ask them specific questions about your configuration and workload.

There are very few knobs to tweak in Symmetrix.  However there are various ways you can configure the system for performance.  Also there are features such as Dynamic Cache Partitioning that can enhance performance of certain applications.  There is a presentation on Symmetrix configuration best practices that was given at EMC World last year that is public for folks that attended.  If you ask your account team, they should be able to get you a copy.

FA ports can also do different number of IOPs based on the same variables I mentioned above.

For small IOs (16k or less), you can assume a 15k drive can do about 150 IOs/sec with reasonable response times.  Remember protection causes more IOs for writes.  100 IOs/sec for 10k, and  about 75 for a SATA disk.

To collect STP, look at the following document on PowerLink.

http://powerlink.emc.com/km/live1/en_US/Offering_Technical/Technical_Documentation/300-002-181_a05_elccnt_0.pdf?mtcs=ZXZlbnRUeXBlPUttQ2xpY2tTZWFyY2hSZXN1bHRzRXZlbnQsZG9jdW1lbnRJZD0wOTAxNDA2NjgwMzEyZDg1LGRhdGFTb3VyY2U9RENUTV9lbl9VU18w

Have you looked into Symmetrix Performance Analyzer? If you are already running Symmetrix Management Console you can just add this on the same host and get performance data directly (without ControlCenter Performance Manager)