Performance - Compaq StorageWorks 4000 - RAID Array Technology Brief

Compaq RAID Array 4000 Overview

Performance

The RA4000 scales capacity and performance simultaneously. Each RA4000 adds processing
power and cache to the overall system. The more hard drives an RA4000 contains, the higher the
I/O performance scales. This fact is best illustrated by comparing the maximum number of I/O
transactions per second per PCI server slot provided by an RA4000 to the maximum number
provided by a ProLiant Storage System controlled by a Smart Array 3200 (SA3200) Controller
(see Figure 9 and Table 2).
In comparative tests performed in Compaq laboratories, test engineers used 2 KB random
accesses to simulate an online transaction processing (OLTP) application. The accesses were
67 percent reads and 33 percent writes. The test results shown in Figure 9 indicate that a Compaq
SA3200 Controller occupying a single PCI server slot can support approximately 939 simulated
OLTP I/O per second. The RA4000, on the other hand, can support approximately 928 OLTP
I/O per second using a single PCI server slot.
Figure 9 shows that the SA3200 Controller gives better performance than the RA4000 up to a
point. The RA4000 scales linearly far beyond the capabilities of SCSI technology. The high
capacity and performance scalability make the RA4000 an ideal storage solution for large,
power-hungry databases.
3000
2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0
Figure 9. Performance scalability of a Fibre Channel system with a simulated workload
11
The SA3200 Controller is a SCSI device.
ECG0205699A
RAID 5: I/O per PCI Slot
Simulated Workload: OLTP
(2 KB, 67% Read, 33% Write, 0% Sequential, 100% Random)
12 24 36
Number of Drives
RAID Array 4000
48 64
Smart Array 3200
20
11
72