Btw, one of our customers recently aquired new gear with HP SmartArray
Gen8 controllers. Now they are something to get excited about! This is
the kind of write performance I would expect from an expensive server
product. Check this out (this is again my artificial benchmark as well
as random write of 4K blocks):
SmartArray P400, 6 300G disks (10k, SAS) RAID 6, 256M BBWC:
ag4
Read 0b Written 161.56Mb Total transferred 161.56Mb (5.3853Mb/sec)
1378.63 Requests/sec executed
random write
Read 0b Written 97.578Mb Total transferred 97.578Mb (3.2526Mb/sec)
832.66 Requests/sec executed
SmartArray Gen8, 8 300G disks (15k, SAS) RAID 5, 2GB FBWC:
ag4
Read 0b Written 2.4575Gb Total transferred 2.4575Gb (83.883Mb/sec)
21474.03 Requests/sec executed
random write
Read 0b Written 343.86Mb Total transferred 343.86Mb (11.462Mb/sec)
2934.24 Requests/sec executed
So yeah, the disks are a bit faster. But what does that matter when
there is such a huge difference otherwise?
Unfortunately, while composing this text, I noticed that the new one
is configured as RAID 5, and I cannot change it because of HP's
licensing policy. That makes it not a meaningful comparison, although
extrapolation from previous SmartArray controllers would suggest that
the RAID5 and RAID6 performance is comparable.
My subjective impression is still a very good one!
|