Lenovo S3200 Quick Start Manual page 13

Lenovo Storage S3200 with Fibre Channel
Storage Performance Planning
Storage performance is an often overlooked aspect of planning an array. It is very
common either to provide too little performance for applications or to provide too much.
Applications will suffer with too little while budgets will suffer with too much. Performance
planning is simplified with hybrid arrays such as the Lenovo Storage S3200. Tools such
as iostat on Linux or PerfMon on Windows will allow you to view your applications
required IOPS. If using vSphere, you can use the performance charts to get a good idea
on what the storage performance requirements will be.
Sizing with an S3200 is made easier by having either an SSD read cache or
performance tiering to SSDs. These features allow the usage of high performance SSD
drives that will allow for thousands of IOPs per drive.
Lenovo B300, B6505 and B6510 considerations
The B300 is an entry level switch for small storage networks. For customers doing
deployments that use 18 or fewer servers and have no upstream SAN, the Lenovo
B6505 with its lower cost of acquisition, will be an optimal fit. If a customer has an
existing SAN, more than 18 servers, or plans on deploying multiple iterations (pods) of
the design detailed in this document, they should use a Lenovo B6510.
With the non-blocking nature of these Generation 5 (16Gbps) Fibre Channel switches, a
single switch configuration requires the consideration of how much bandwidth needs to
go to a compute node as well as the uplinks to storage. With 16 Gbps speeds, two links
to each controller on the S3200 should saturate the system and the same will occur on
the server. For multiple switch configurations, see the Brocade SAN Design and Best
Practices Guide in the Other Reading section.
Validation Setup and Diagram
The validation setup included three servers, two Fibre Channel switches, and one
storage array with a minimum configuration of drives. These drives consisted of four
nearline SAS drives and two SSDs for a performance tier. The performance tier license
was applied. Also included was 10 gigabit and gigabit Ethernet infrastructure for
management and node communication that is not included in this document. For
reference, a Brocade ICX 6430 and two VDX 6740 switches were utilized. For details on
what was tested, see the Bill of Materials section below. For a visual representation of
the storage configuration, see the figure below.
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