EMC announced yesterday that it has shattered the performance limits it previously set for storage throughput and bandwidth in a VMware vSphere® 5 environment, providing breakneck performance for customers’ cloud initiatives.
Performance testing of an EMC® Symmetrix® VMAX® storage system connected with six Emulex LPe12002 8Gb/s Fibre Channel Host Bus adapters (HBAs) achieved in excess of 1,000,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS). The Symmetrix VMAX system was configured with eight engines and 960 disk drives. The testing showed that at peak load, the Symmetrix VMAX was able to support a virtual machine (VM)-level response time of two milliseconds and illustrated the ability of VMware vSphere 5, the Symmetrix VMAX and Emulex LPe12002 HBAs to leverage the scaling and performance of the latest Intel® Xeon® processors.
The Fibre Channel HBA that links servers to storage networks provides a critical connection in the flow of data. Emulex 8Gb/s dual-channel HBAs boast high-performance throughput, more effective CPU utilization, and 127% greater second channel I/O transaction performance. While other 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs deliver optimum throughput through only one channel, with performance degrading significantly through the second port, Emulex HBAs deliver the highest data throughput on both channels. With both channels operating efficiently, performance bottlenecks in the server, in which they are placed, are a non-issue. Additionally, no port, electrical power or cooling is wasted.
Achieving over one million IOPS with an 8KB request size through the least number of HBAs required the HBAs to collectively provide 8Gb/s of throughput. Although five dual-channel 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs could theoretically meet the 8Gb per second throughput requirement, at that throughput, each HBA would be operating near the HBA’s saturation level. To ensure sufficient concurrency and still have enough capacity to push over a million IOPS, six HBAs were used. This required each HBA to support at least 1.3GB per second.
VMware’s performance engineers shared this IOMeter screen shot with us that shows OVER 1 Million IOPS. Enough said.
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