FAS 2040 disappointing sequential throughput and very high CPU usage
With “only” 220 MB/s sequential throughput measured with Iometer and filecopy over 2 x 1 Gbit (3 x 1 Gbit) ISCSI and MPIO (ISCSI Ontap DSM MCS) we are somewhat disappointed about performance.
(We used 128 KB sequential, 100 % read/write, 0% random, 4x workers and up to 4/8/16 outstanding I.O. As well small random workload behaved quite disappointing. Sequential small workload was very good (4-8 K).
We used a 48 Disk 64 bit Aggregate (2 x RG 24 Disks 600GB 10k RPM (2246 shelf)),with Ontap 8.0.2 and Window 2008 R2 as testing environment.
We cloud "clearly" establish that the main bottleneck is poor CPU Performance. Although, load was spread quite well on the 2 x cores on the FAS 2040 CPU, CPU was always 90-95 % and fully busy. The rest of the 10% is reserved for the kahuna domain (RAID… etc.). When checking with sysstat –x 1, sysstat –m 1 etc. and most useful the performance monitoring form DPM.. we cloud see that the individual disks in the plex, where never used more than ~20-40 % (RAID_DP/P disks little more)
The most disappoint is that together with VM Ware ESX 4.1i or 5.0 when using VM Clone, VMotion etc.(Even if active VAII) the CPU load goes very fast to 85-90% on all cores, and “disturbing” all other Netapp Services. We observed all problems as well with NFS.
So the point is that (example Qnapp etc.) is not performing much worse than a 2040A which coast much more. As well if you take SAN Storage from other manufactures, you get far better performance, mainly for sequent. There some achieve 800 MB/s. Yes we know 2040 is entry but still coast >50K in A/A config.
If Netapp would use more powerful CPU the 2040 cloud get at least 2-3 times better performance.
Which experiences you did? Concerning 2040 or may with 3270 ?
