Tag Archives: EFD

EMC – I heart EFD performance

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We got some EFDs on our CX4-960s recently, and we had the chance to do some basic PassMark testing on them before we loaded them up with production configurations. We’re running 30 * 200GB EFDs in a Storage Pool on the CX4-960. FAST and FAST Cache haven’t been turned on. The VM was sitting on an HP BL460p G6 blade with 96GB RAM, 12 Nehalem cores and vSphere 4.1. The blades connect to the arrays via Cisco 9124e FC switches with 8Gbps port-channels to the Cisco MDS 9513. We’re only using 2 fe ports per SP on the CX4-960 at the moment. We used Pass Mark on a Windows 2008 R2 VM sitting on a 100GB vmdk. There wasn’t a lot of other LUNs bound in the Storage Pool, so the results are skewed. Nonetheless, they look pretty, and that’s what I’m going with.

100% Sequential Write:

 

Results:

100% Sequential Read:

Results:

File Server Simulation (80% Read, 20% Write):

Results:

EMC FAST and FAST Cache

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I don’t have a lot to say on FAST or FAST Cache just yet – because the PO hasn’t quite made its way to EMC. But when I was researching the topic I found Matt Taylor’s post on this topic to be an excellent summary – particularly the point about configuration options. Particularly if you’re rolling with multiple CX4-960s – as we are. I think it’s going to scream :)