Enterprise Grade Fibre Chanel SAN in 5 Minutes?

An article by Janusz Bak    No Comments

I am not kidding.

We were getting queries about the performance of our latest DSS V6 build 4786. So I needed to quickly set up a performance benchmark. It took me about 5 minutes to set one up with a Fibre Channel volume connected to a VMware ESXi 4.1.0 host. My test server has a 4Gb dual-port FC HBA, so in order to get maximum performance I configured a round-robin Multipath. Then I ran IOmeter on a Windows 2008 virtual machine. With 4 workers and a 256k block size I obtained over 700 MB/sec sequential writes. My DSS V6 (build 4786) has RAID 5 with 8 hard disks. Here is a screenshot showing IOmeter running.

The latest DSS V6 release makes it possible to configure this in 5 minutes. This release has new SCSI target software which allows me to switch Initiator/target mode dynamically without rebooting. It supports Automatic Session Reassignment so I can add or remove volumes; I can also reconfigure WWN and groups dynamically while other volumes remain in service. These are all great features for datacenter administrators. With latest DSS V6 running on commodity hardware you can build an enterprise grade Fibre Channel SAN in 5 minutes!