SAN/CXFS test report to LLNL
The primary objectives of this project were to evaluate the performance of the SGI CXFS File System in a Storage Area Network (SAN) and compare/contrast it to the performance of a locally attached XFS file system on the same computer and storage subsystems. The University of Minnesota participants were asked to verify that the performance of the SAN/CXFS configuration did not fall below 85% of the performance of the XFS local configuration. There were two basic hardware test configurations constructed from the following equipment: Two Onyx 2 computer systems each with two Qlogic-based Fibre Channel/XIO Host Bus Adapter (HBA); One 8-Port Brocade Silkworm 2400 Fibre Channel Switch; and Four Ciprico RF7000 RAID Disk Arrays populated Seagate Barracuda 50GB disk drives. The Operating System on each of the ONYX 2 computer systems was IRIX 6.5.6. The first hardware configuration consisted of directly connecting the Ciprico arrays to the Qlogic controllers without the Brocade switch. The purpose for this configuration was to establish baseline performance data on the Qlogic controllers / Ciprico disk raw subsystem. This baseline performance data would then be used to demonstrate any performance differences arising from the addition of the Brocade Fibre Channel Switch. Furthermore, the performance of the Qlogic controllers could be compared to that of the older, Adaptec-based XIO dual-channel Fibre Channel adapters previously used on these systems. It should be noted that only raw device tests were performed on this configuration. No file system testing was performed on this configuration. The second hardware configuration introduced the Brocade Fibre Channel Switch. Two FC ports from each of the ONYX2 computer systems were attached to four ports of the switch and the four Ciprico arrays were attached to the remaining four. Raw disk subsystem tests were performed on the SAN configuration in order to demonstrate the performance differences between the direct-connect and the switched configurations. After this testing was completed, the Ciprico arrays were formatted with an XFS file system and performance numbers were gathered to establish a File System Performance Baseline. Finally, the disks were formatted with CXFS and further tests were run to demonstrate the performance of the CXFS file system. A summary of the results of these tests is given.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Defense Programs (DP) (US)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-48
- OSTI ID:
- 756832
- Report Number(s):
- UCRL-CR-137914; DP0101039; DP0101039; TRN: AH200025%%49
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: 1 Jan 2000
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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