[OmniOS-discuss] Dell vs. Supermicro and any recommendations..

[Andy]

On Thu, 12 Mar 2015, Andy wrote:

;
; On Wed, 11 Mar 2015, Andy wrote:
;
; ;
; ; On Fri, 27 Feb 2015, Dan McDonald wrote:
; ;
; ; ;
; ; ; > On Feb 27, 2015, at 5:05 AM, Andy <omnios at citrus-it.net> wrote:
; ; ; >
; ; ; > If we go ahead, I'll let you all know how it goes!
; ; ;
; ; ; Please do that.  If you can zap a Dell Standard HBA out of HW-RAID and into a raw-disk controller, that'd be a HUGE WIN for illumos distros everywhere.
; ;
; ; Initial results look good to me. This is a Dell R730 with a PERC H730
; ; RAID card in it and just a pair of 300GB SAS disks for now. The card
; ; is configured in non-RAID/HBA mode through the standard BIOS menus.
;
; I spoke too soon - disk performance seems generally poor with high service
; times :( Everything's working apart from the disks briefly going away
; at boot, just slow.

Same story on a different R730. Abysmal disk performance in HBA mode,
apparently regardless of BIOS and RAID card firmware versions; at least
based on the four combinations I tried.

	  extended device statistics       ---- errors ---
r/s  w/s  Mr/s  Mw/s wait actv wsvc_t asvc_t %w %b s/w h/w trn tot device
0.0 142.0  0.0  11.6  0.0 10.0  0.0   70.4   0 100  0  0  0  0 c0t0d1s0
0.0 142.6  0.0  11.6  0.0 10.0  0.0   70.1   0 100  0  0  0  0 c0t1d1s0

and I have seen asvc_t > 300 with this test workload.

However, with a mirrored rpool on top of RAID0 devices:

                  extended device statistics       ---- errors ---
r/s  w/s  Mr/s  Mw/s wait actv wsvc_t asvc_t %w %b s/w h/w trn tot device
0.0 2829.2 0.0 232.0 0.0  9.8  0.0    3.5  2 99  0  0  0  0 c0t0d0s0
0.0 2823.6 0.0 231.5 0.0  9.9  0.0    3.5  2 100 0  0  0  0 c0t1d0s0

Off to play with dtrace and see if I can work out what's happening.

Andy

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