Veritas-bu

Re: [Veritas-bu] Some info on my experiences with 10GbE

2007-10-18 09:34:49
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Some info on my experiences with 10GbE
From: Karl.Rossing AT federated DOT ca
To: "Peters, Devon C" <Peters.Devon AT con-way DOT com>, VERITAS-BU AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2007 08:10:29 -0500

Devon,

Good to hear that T2000's are screamers.

What are the library/tape drive specs. Are the drives FC attached? or are they attached via scsi to the media server?

Thanks,
Karl

> From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu [mailto:veritas-bu-
> bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of Peters, Devon C
> Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2007 12:12 PM
> To: VERITAS-BU AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
> Subject: [Veritas-bu] Some info on my experiences with 10GbE

>  
> Since I've seen a little bit of talk about 10GbE on here in the past
> I figured I'd share some of my experiences...

> I've recently been testing some of Sun's dual-port 10GbE NICs on
> some small T2000's (1Ghz, 4-core).  I'm only using a single port on
> each card, and the servers are currently directly connected to each
> other (waiting for my network team to get switches and fibre in place).

> So far, I've been able to drive throughput between these two systems
> to about 7500Mbit/sec using iperf.  When the throughput gets this
> high, all the cores/threads on the receiving T2000 become saturated
> and TCP retransmits start climbing, but both systems remain quite
> responsive.  Since these are only 4-core T2000's, I would guess that
> the 6 or 8-core T2000's (especially with 1.2Ghz or 1.4Ghz
> processors) should be capable of more throughput, possibly near line speed.

> The down side achieving this high of throughput is that it requires
> lots of data streams.  When transmitting with a single data stream,
> the most throughput I've gotten is about 1500Mbit/sec.  I only got
> up to 7500Mbit/s when using 64 data streams…  Also, the biggest
> gains seem to be in the jump from 1 to 8 data streams;  with 8
> streams I was able to get throughput up to 6500Mbit/sec.

> Our goal for 10GbE, is to be able to restore data from tape at a
> speed of at least 2400Mbit/sec (300MB/sec).  We have large daily
> backups (3-4TB) that we would like to be able to restore (not
> backup) in a reasonable amount of time.  These restores are used to
> refresh our test and development environments with current data.  
> The actual backups are done with array based snapshots (HDS
> ShadowCopy), which then get mounted and backed up by a dedicated
> media server (6-core T2000).  We're currently getting about
> 650MB/sec of throughput with the backups (9 streams on 3 LTO3 tape
> drives - MPX=3 and it's very compressible data).

> Going off my iperf results, the restoring this data using 9 streams
> should get us well over 2400Mbit/sec.  But - we haven't installed
> the cards on our media servers yet, so I have yet to see what the
> actual performanee of netbackup and LTO3 over 10GbE is.  I'm hopeful
> it'll be close to the iperf results, but if it doesn't meet the goal
> then we'll be looking at other options.

> --
> Devon Peters _______________________________________________
> Veritas-bu maillist  -  Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
> http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
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