Anyone have this same data for a Windows server ?
JOhn
-----Original Message-----
From: Legato NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU]
On Behalf Of Robert Maiello
Sent: Wednesday, February 15, 2006 6:43 AM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [Networker] sizing a Sun server for a 4xLTO3 tape library
That is well summed up Vernon, the key concept being 2 LTO3 drives (and
even 2 LTO2 drives) can "eat" a gigabit NIC all on there own.
That said, I'd like to add that looking at PCI buses for the HBAs and/or
NICs I'm always hard pressed to pick a particular SUN server up to the
task. Perhaps others can reccommend one? The ideal server being one
where every card is connected to a seperate high speed PCI bus.
Also, it has been seen that Solaris 9 or Solaris 10 is needed to get the
throughput out of mulitple NICS.
Robert Maiello
Pioneer Data Systems
On Tue, 14 Feb 2006 15:34:25 -0800, Vernon Harris <harriv00 AT YAHOO DOT COM>
wrote:
>Ty,
>Rule of thumb for sizing a sun server to drive 4 x
>LTO3 drives would be as follows:
>
> For each LTO-3 drive you would need a minimum of approximately
>1.25GHZ of processing power. That would include the processing power
>necessary to handle 1 gigabit ethernet nic card. But to adequately
>drive the 4 LTO-3 drives if you backup methodology is lan based
>backups, you should consider adding a second nic card and trunking the
>2 nic cards together to create a fat network pipe. Otherwise max
>throughput would be limited to approximately 80-90MB/sec, which is the
>practical thruput limit of gigabit ethernet. If you add a second nic,
>you will need 1.5GHZ of processor power per drive.
>
>Practically, most servers can never generate enough i/o to keep LTO-3
>drives spooling without shoeshining the drives. The installations that
>I've seen with
>LTO-3 drives configured attached to solaris servers have not
>expererienced performance issues on the servers.
>
>One important problem that I've seen repeatedly on Sun Servers attached
>to the fabric is with Sun Branded qlogic hba's using the leadville
>driver stack. This is manifested with link offline errors in the
>/var/adm/messages file which causes the hba to go offline and the
>connected drives and libraries to disappear from the fabric. This
>condition can only be resolved by rebooting the server. Stick with
>native emulex or qlogic cards. Otherwise you are asking for major
>problems.
>
>--- Ty Young <Phillip_Young AT I2 DOT COM> wrote:
>
>> All,
>>
>> I apologize in advance if this topic has been covered. I looked
>> through the archive using a variety of search terms without
>> successful results.
>>
>> We have determined that a 4 x LTO3 tape library will work well in our
>> environment. Our Sun SEs, however, claim that
>> attempting to drive such a
>> library with one host (i.e. where all four LTO3 drives are
>> fiber-connected through a switch into the server) is asking for
>> trouble and that we really must consider driving it with two, in
>> order to split up the gigE network bandwidth requirements as well as
>> the FC HBA bandwidth requirements.
>> Their argument seems to be based on the theoretical maximum sustained
>> I/O that a Sun server backplane can handle, at 1.2 GB/sec.
>>
>> What I'm not understanding is how one calculates I/O across a server.
>> Given that a server takes network traffic (input) and routes it to
>> the tape drives (output), is it accurate to basically double the
>> aggregate write-rate of a bunch of tape drives (read and
>> write) and then double that
>> number again to factor in performance with drive compression ?
>>
>> My head is so full of numbers and stats at the moment that I cannot
>> think
>> straight and I need some help. Thanks!
>>
>> -ty
>>
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