2Gb iSCSI traffic to a Equallogic PS6000


This screenshot is not really interresting, unless you are as nerdy as I am ;-)

It shows a disk benchmark to an iSCSI disk supplied by a Equallogic SAN. I have two 1Gb nics connected to the san. The multipath software supplied by Equallogic is making sure that both network connections are used to their max. A wopping 234MB/sec is the result. A curious thing to note is that the write speed is consistently higher than the read speed. I think that this has to do with the cache in the controller that is set to write back. This means that the controller inside the Equallogic tells the client that data is stored on disk, while it is only written inside the cache memory. Thus: there is no delay from the disk needing to finish its write action.

On the other hand: the read action is slower, because the data really needs to come from the disks. Cache in this situation only helps you if there are subsequent reads of the same datablocks.

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