nickelj

Yes...unfortunately there is no way to change raid types without wiping the data. But based on my experience...it is well worth it. Even if you do leave it at Double Parity Raid, the unit performs much better than it previously did, so just upgrading is worth it. Jim

Just in case this wasn't clear...this was using 1 gigabit NICs. In my experience...iSCSI usually does outperform NFS in "real world" situations with other devices. The Comstar code in the new iSCSI for the Sun 7000 series of storage units makes a big difference. However, as indicated - NFS is better if you are going to go with RAID6 - double parity raid. I wouldn't trust the Write Cache enabled numbers for iSCSI - the cache will fill up pretty fast and is not big enough on a 7110 (it is only 3-4 GB) to sustain the throughput. I did some testing under load and the results were very "all-over-the-place" with iSCSI and Double Parity Raid. Much more consistent with NFS and Double Parity Raid. However, the RAID10 (mirroring) with iSCSI was really good - the minimum figures would be the ones I posted above without Write Cache Enabled and they would only get better with it enabled. The units that have the SSD's (everything except the 7110 I think) should not suffer the same performance hit with Double Parity Raid and iSCSI. When I moved from iSCSI and Double Parity Raid this weekend to a Mirrored (RAID10) with iSCSI, the performance difference was huge - users noticed right away and my ATTO benchmarks from within the VM's hit over a 100 mbps and were consistently good. I would highly recommend upgrading to the version I listed in my post. Oh and by the way...it now has a Dedupe checkbox! Jim

Hi Everyone, Since you shared with me and it helped me out, I thought I would share back. Our environment is VMware vSphere (ESX 4) with HP GB switches to a single Sun 7110. The servers are Sun X4150's with 32 GB RAM and 2.83 GHz Xeon CPU's. I have vlanned off the storage onto private network, but I have not teamed anything for this test. All tests were done with a single NIC from the servers and a single NIC on the 7110. The version of firmware on the 7110 was 2010.02.09.0.0,1-1.9 For IOMeter, I used the same icf file listed at the front of this thread. I tested from within a Windows 2003 VM and I didn't format the partition in Windows 2003. There were no other VM's accessing the Sun 7110 at the time of the tests. Also...some information about how the Sun 7110 is setup for the tests: For NFS - Data Dedupe is off, Data Compression is off, Synchronous Write Bias is set to Throughput and Database Record size is 128K For iSCSI - Data Dedupe is off, Data Compression is off, Synchronous Write Bias is set to Throughput, Block sizes set to 64K and turned Write Cache on. Obviously if you turn things like Data Dedupe on...it is gonna slow things down a bit. I thought a comparison of NFS and iSCSI would be good, plus a comparison of Double Parity Raid to RAID 10 (mirrored). You know that mirrored should be faster, but how much faster...will it be worth it to you? This may help you decide. So....for Double Parity Raid- NFS: Total I/O's per Second: 323.13 Total MB's per Second: 3.44 Average I/O Response Time: 3.0941 Maximum I/O Response Time: 330.4260 % CPU Utilization: 1.18 iSCSI: Total I/O's per Second: 2648.69 Total MB's per Second: 28.61 Average I/O Response Time: 0.377 Maximum I/O Response Time: 475.4195 % CPU Utilization: 5.51 Mirrored (RAID10)- NFS: Total I/O's per Second: 557.49 Total MB's per Second: 5.77 Average I/O Response Time: 1.7932 Maximum I/O Response Time: 513.4279 % CPU Utilization: 1.58 iSCSI: Total I/O's per Second: 2211.62 Total MB's per Second: 24.31 Average I/O Response Time: 0.4516 Maximum I/O Response Time: 1719.4337 % CPU Utilization: 4.68 Obviously the write cache is having a significant effect. So...I did one last test with iSCSI with the Write Cache disabled. Also..interestingly, the RAID10 iSCSI performance was not higher with Write Cache enabled. Notice that the response time with iSCSI with Write Cache enabled is much faster than NFS. The other problem I have with the Write Cache is I am not convinced that the above numbers would be accomplished during "real world" usage - especially after the cache is full. Here are the results of iSCSI with Write Cache disabled. iSCSI RAID10 - Write Cache Disabled Total I/O's per Second: 638.14 Total MB's per Second: 6.82 Average I/O Response Time: 1.5665 Maximum I/O Response Time: 215.4945 % CPU Utilization: 2.04 iSCSI Double Parity Raid - Write Cache Disabled Total I/O's per Second: 120.50 Total MB's per Second: 1.29 Average I/O Response Time: 8.2981 Maximum I/O Response Time: 1001.3984 % CPU Utilization: 1.03 So...without the cache....RAID10 is still faster, but Double Parity Raid looks bad with iSCSI compared to NFS. So...who is the winner would depend on what you need - if you need space and go with RAID6 (Double Parity Raid), then NFS is the winner. If you want the best performance and can sacrifice space...then iSCSI with RAID10 is better. Jim