Intel NAS Performance Toolkit

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lightp2

Gawd
Joined
Oct 28, 2009
Messages
672
Hi, this post is a generic suggestion. The intention is after reading tremendous amount of huge storage systems here in the forum, I am curious how their results compare.

1. I read Intel NAS Performance Toolkit on Intel website

2. I wonder about users here with 8-24 disks in their file servers

3. So far I keep seeing HDTune/CrystalDiskMark for raw transfer statistics, would some of forum members with big storage also post Intel NAS Performance Toolkit figure/charts, as claim in Intel presentation slide, they have workloads that mimic real usage patterns.

I have not run such test (cause usually I have only 2 or 3 disks,does not mean much in the overall scheme) I do not have any immediate need per this post. Just curiosity.

Cheers.
 
I figure only willing users will go further so I grab the summary here. My curiosity is from the presentation slide where they obtain results in the region of 30-40MByte/s. The list items are what they feel represent more realistic usage scenario of users. I recommend the presentation ppt file.

With all the latest huge NAS posts from every angle in this forum (read all the >8TB WHS/ZFS posts), I am just trying to find out whether the situation somehow improves?

Cheers.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-nas-performance-toolkit/

Tests
HD Video Play
2HD Video Play
3HD Video Play
4HD Video Play
HD Video Record
HD Video Play & Record
2HD Video Play & Record
Directory Copy From NAS
Directory Copy To NAS
File Copy From NAS
File Copy To NAS
Photo Album
Office Productivity
Content Creation
Backup
Restore
HD Play with Office Apps
HD Play with Backup
 
As an update to my original suggestion, I have an unoptimized test setup (but still good enough for standard copy big-file test. It wasn't fast but doable)

Using that setup, my score for the Photo Album test is very low. Somewhat surprise and learning about actual software behavior making a lot of the claim needs for Gigabit saturation a deeper assessment. I have small number of disks in my test so this should be understandable. I just wonder about those Photography builds sometimes seen in the forums.

The various HD Video Play tests are however reasonable. As to actual figure, the software environment does not allow publish benchmark unless permission. I am not thinking about getting permission for small random tests so I can only go so far for now. Apology.
 
I got the following results from my NexentaCore box with 2 RaidZ1 vDevs of 5 750 GB SATA II disks served through ESX via 2GB FC
The ESX server also has 2 gigabit ethernet connections

nas.PNG
 
Hi, appreciate your effort in running the full tests and listing the results here.

It does give an indicative overall impression. I see that per the Photo Album and other non-HD tests, the scores are relatively low, the trend mirrors what I saw. Atleast per the tests, what Intel claims in their slides still seem applicable even today. And you do have a relatively reasonable disks setup.

The results are somewhat even more relevant for NAS/Virtualization combination putting various aspects in perspective. For example, I imagine in today's environment, 10G Ethernet is an option. However, here I think per your statistics with that many disks, we are still not hitting the limit for many generic workloads. Thus if I have much less disk numbers, I dont even need to look into that.

Another thing is it does put SATA-mechanical-array in perpective. SSD will definitely raise the numbers but RAID/TRIM combination kind of making that difficult for now.

As per some general idea, I am thinking how 8-disks syetem will look because I think that's the maximum generic systems can reach and thus my interest in understanding. Anything more probably requires complicated builds which are somewhat out of reach for me.

Many thanks.
 
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