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

We've been pretty happy with the T2000's.

The tape library is an IBM 3584, the tape drives are IBM's 4Gb FC LTO-3 drives, there's a dedicated 4Gb HBA for each drive, and everything is connected to 4Gb McData switches.

We used to have IBM's 2Gb FC LTO-3 drives, and with those the peak performance was around 165MB/s per drive. These 4Gb drives peak at around 265MB/s per drive, though with all 3 tape drives active, we see throughput closer to 220MB/s per drive...I'm guessing we're bottlenecked by the ports on our disk subsystem at the moment, but since performance is more than acceptable we're not looking to tune this any further - at least not until our LTO-4 drives are installed next month ;).

-devon

From: Karl.Rossing AT Federated DOT CA [mailto:Karl.Rossing AT Federated DOT CA]
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2007 6:10 AM
To: Peters, Devon C; VERITAS-BU AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Some info on my experiences with 10GbE

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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