Storage Pro's

Jon-NC · 10th December 2008

I've posted this on another forum. I'm sure some of you are more up on storage than myself.

"Hi There,

We've recently added an MSA60 with 12 1TB disks in for image backups. Currently the drive is running really really slowly. Its connected to a windows server via a p600 RAID card. The serverhardware is decent (dual cpu, 4gb ram, SCSI).

The MSA is currently setup with 5 x RAID 5 and Global hot spare.

I really need to get this array performing better as our image copies are taking ages. What would be the best setup? Scrapping the 2x RAID5 and Opting for a RAID10? Would running Linux help at all (the drives are heavily defragmented after a months use)?

Any options would be appreciated. If you have any good website stats or comparison links for speed that'd be good too.

TIA

JSamuel · 10th December 2008

Hi Jon,

I do ProAVIO with ATTO cards... Already have this deployed in various DCs... SATA/SAS drives, hot-swap drives, web/console control, dual hotswap PSU, daisy-chainable (up to 8 chassis depending on the card, 16 drives per chassis)... Usual, plus RAID6.. etc.

Jon-NC · 10th December 2008

We've already purchased the hardware and are not looking to replace it.

pipeten · 11th December 2008

12TB on SATA, image backups, what software, over what network and is it just disk IO issues or ?... it's a bit early in the morning for me to go into that. We use r1soft linux cdp for a mix of 4 hourly/daily backups with long retention for 50 hosts per PE1950 and MD1000 pair (for comparison).

Jon-NC · 11th December 2008

We are using ESX Ranger Pro to backup Virtual Machines to the storage. Server is connected to the network via 2 x 1gb NIC's bonded together. Ther server is a DL380 G4. Dual Proc, 4gb ram, SCSI 10k disks.

I'm sure that having 1tb disks isn't helping at all but 100gb backups are taking 20 hours or more. Just coping files to the MSA is slow. The server is fairly powerful and I'm wondering whether i've completely missed the boat on setting up the RAID on the unit?

Checked NIC use this morning as its below 1%.

netserve · 11th December 2008

I've not used the MSA before or Ranger pro but I'd guess there are some clues in what you've said so far.

FWIW, we use Rsync for backups, if we backup 100Gb of data as a single backup it takes twice as long as if we take the same data and back it up as 5 x 20Gb so, I'd say first port of call for debugging is to eliminate the ram as an issue and time a 1Gb backup. Try it to the local disk, then the MSA just to see if the local disks and server are up to speed or if you get the same performance hit doing a small local backup. (even try it to a 2nd local server to eliminate the network connection/firewall)

Lots of little tests to try and figure out a pattern is all I can suggest for the moment because you're getting less than 10Mb/sec backup speed ie less than the performance of a single drive.

PeteK · 15th December 2008

Jon.

Have you considered your cluster size. If this is backup only territory in continuous large files then you need to stick the cluster size up immensely.

I also wondered whether they were SATA 2 disks and you controller supported NCQ, rather than TCQ on SATA 1?

Have you tried a basic disk speed util (HD Tach?) to check up and down stream rates?

Is your controller on the fastest bus in your motherboard?

Fragmentation happens whatever the OS is. Keep it down with something automated.

Jon-NC · 15th December 2008

Hi Pete,

Thanks, i managed to sort this on Friday by increasing the cluster size. After running some test writes went from 5mb/s to 128mb/s and the unit is running alot better.

A faulty BBWC didn't help or the original setup of 2x RAID 5 arrays.

Thanks for your help all.