ONTAP Hardware

Average speed iSCSI over GigabitEthernet

umonteiro
6,378 Views

Share your experience about speed.

I get average speed between 36 and 56 MB/s. (real)

My environment FAS2020 with RedHat 5(iscsi-initiator).

I dont have jumboframes, linkaggregation and multipath.

Any suggestion for improve speed?

6 REPLIES 6

radek_kubka
6,379 Views

I dont have jumboframes

First & foremost - enable jumbo frames!

(see detailed discussion over there:

http://communities.netapp.com/thread/6000)

Regards,
Radek

dchilton
6,379 Views

In addition, increasing the number of threads also known as concurrency can increase throughput. It wasn't clear what the workoad is, but the FAS system is designed to perform excellent when multiple clients, or applications with multiple threads are sending data requests.  

Another good idea is to separate out the iSCSI traffic onto a private VLAN.  This is similar to separating Fibre Channel traffic on to a Fibre Channel SAN; except in this case the "Storage Area Network" being used is Gigabit Ethernet.  Separating the traffic ensures that consistent, good bandwidth is available for the iSCSI server to FAS connection.  It prevents other less improtant networking traffic, for example Desktop users downloading mp3s from interfering with your iSCSI storage traffic.

amiller_1
6,379 Views

Also, what is your disk setup in the NetApp and how full is your volume and/or aggregate?

umonteiro
6,379 Views

Hello Andrew,

Your doubt about disk setups and aggregate in my environment is:

14 disks Fibre Channel forming one single aggregate, with 1 spare disk and 2 parity disks in RaidDP.

Any suggest to grow performance ?

Thank-you

amiller_1
6,379 Views

Sounds like a logical disk setup -- the most obvious way to grow back-end disk performance is just to add another shelf and then grow the aggregate (add another 13 disk RAID group and go to 2 hot spares to keep things balanced).

Before doing that though, if you have Operations Manager in the environment, it comes with Performance Advisor which can show you quite nicely if you're maxing out your disk throughput on the aggregate.

it_4
6,379 Views

I would definitly enable Jumbo frame, and if you have enough interface: vif

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