Storage Matrix; Cpu & Bios; Intel Nehalem And Westmere Architecture Information; Amd Information - Dell PowerConnect W-Airwave Manual

Storage Matrix

# of Min. AWMS
Devices Storage
100
*75 GB
200
75 GB
500
75 GB
1,000
75 GB
2,500 187 GB
2,500 + 300 GB
* The 75 GB requirement on the smaller installation (100-500) accounts for the OS and swap overhead,
plus it is very difficult to install a single disk with less 75 GB capacity.
Note: Please ensure the disk subsystem can sustain these random write rates. Sustained sequential write rates will
not help, because AWMS writes are primarily random.
CPU & BIOS

Intel Nehalem and Westmere Architecture Information

With the advent of Nehalem, Intel makes a giant leap in the FSB to support NUMA (Non Uniform
Memory Access). In NUMA, memory on the same processor board as the CPU (local memory) is
accessed faster than memory on other processor boards (shared memory), hence the "non-uniform"
nomenclature. As a result, NUMA architecture scales much better to higher numbers of CPUs/cores
than SMP.

32-bit - ensure NUMA is disabled.
Some vendors' BIOS refer to non NUMA as "Memory Node Interleaving". Ensure

"Memory Node Interleaving" is "Enabled" on 32-bit operating systems.
By default most vendors disable this setting in their BIOS.


64-bit - ensure NUMA is enabled. Some vendors' BIOS have "NUMA Enabled" or "NUMA-Aware
OS" options.
Ensure Power Management is configured to "Maximum Performance." By default most vendors
configure BIOS to an eco-friendly setting.
Ensure Memory Operating Mode is configured to "Optimizer Mode" if available.

AMD Information

Dell does not actively conduct scalability testing for the AMD processor product line. These numbers
are based on published performance data versus the Intel product line. See Appendix below for details
in the AMD Scalability Matrix.
Max. AWMS
*IOPS
Storage
2 x random writes to
reads
75 GB 60
120
75 GB
300
75 GB
150 GB 600
375 GB 1,500
600 GB 3,000
Storage System
(1) Drive 15K RPM
(1) Drive 15K RPM
Multiple 15K RPM RAID Drives
Multiple 15K RPM RAID Drives
Multiple 15K RPM RAID Drives
Multiple 15K RPM & SSD RAID Drives