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Conference ssag::ask_ssag

Title:Ask the Storage Architecture Group
Notice:Check out our web page at http://www-starch.shr.dec.com
Moderator:SSAG::TERZAN
Created:Wed Oct 15 1986
Last Modified:Fri Jun 06 1997
Last Successful Update:Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:6756
Total number of notes:25276

6656.0. "KZPSC TO HSZ50" by NNTPD::"[email protected]" (Balaji) Mon May 05 1997 23:47

Hello

We have a customer who has migrayed from KZPSC (With 32 MB cache) to an  
KZPSA- HSZ50(32MB cache) on a SW500 box. 

He finds that the spplication performnce has suddenly deterioated.The disk
layouts and 
other things are the same. What might be the problem?

One thing which I found was that he was using WIDE disks on a BA356 Box whern
using 
an KZPSC . I suppose HSZ50 does not support WIDE disks which might be the
problem
and he is getting very bad IO throughput.

Secondly , disks were directly connected to KZPSC while in HSZ50's case it is
coming 
through an KZPSA which is an addtional overhead.

Are the above two point are the only ones or I have missed out something.
Please do comment on the above.any more suggestions are welcome.

The config is AS8200 5/300
Memory 1 GB.
Digital Unix 3.2d-2

Warm regards
Balaji
 
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6656.1GVPROD::MSTEINERTue May 06 1997 01:509
    >> What might be the problem?
    
    On the KZPSC the disks were set write-back, but the customer forgot to
    apply the same setting on the HSZ units ?
    
    PS: You can connect wide drives to HSZ, but you'll need the 8 bit
    module in the BA356.
    
    Michel.
6656.2SMURF::KNIGHTFred KnightTue May 06 1997 15:1811
Don't forget that the KZPSC is directly connected to 
the systems PCI bus.  The HSZ must go via a SCSI bus
into a scsi adapter and then onto the PCI bus.

The PCI bus is something like 100+ Mb/sec, but the
wide SCSI bus is 20- Mb/sec.  It has nothing to do with
the overhead of the KZPSA; you just created a bottleneck
when you replaced the PCI direct connect with the SCSI
interconnect.

	Fred
6656.3EPS::VANDENHEUVELHeinThu May 08 1997 10:4620
    
    Well, the HSZ will ofcourse introduce an additional latency when
    the data has to come from / go to the disk. Verifying the write-
    back setting is ofcourse a good suggestion. Also, the swxcr was
    likely using stripe sets with small (default = 8KB) chunk sizes 
    delivering data in parallel from drives where the HSZ is likely 
    to be set up with large (128KB?) chunk sizes, hitting just a disk 
    at a time.
    
    You really should define 'performance is bad' better.
    Notably, was the application looking for througput (bps, MB/sec)
    or IO rate (tps, IO/sec). Mostly read or mostly write?
    To fully calculate out the problem, we'll need average IO rates,
    avg IO sizes, queue depths? read-ahead? striping/raid-5/jbod?
    and so on.
    
    
    hth,
    	Hein.