Solaris

We're moving our production 3510FC to development, so we need to replace the production 3510FC. The 6140 is nice, but pricey.

Here's the question: Would two 2540's (RAID 10) be 'faster' than one 3510? (RAID 10) and faster than one 6140 (RAID 10)?

One StoregeTek 6140 (16x72GB 15k rpm fc-al RAID 10) vs. Two StoregeTek 2540 's (24x72GB 15k rpm SAS RAID 10)

While the 2540 uses SAS drives vs the 6140 FC-AL drives, the specs on the drives are nearly identical as far as average latency etc as listed on seagate.com (SAS = ST373455SS ) (FC-AL = ST373455FC )

Oh yeah, we're an Oracle shop, so my assumption is that, with drives & HBA being equal, the more spindles the better.

Hey,

the 2540 will be faster than the 3510 and the 6140 is faster than the 2540.
Why?
The 2540 has SAS-Drives or SATA-Drives with 3 GB/s, only the host-connection
is 4 GB/s. The 6140 has FC-Disks with 4 GB/s. So on the 6140 you will be able
the full 4 GB transport to the disks. And the Cache-Controller of the 6140 is greater.
Here some trends from the test center of SUN/LSI:
2540 / ca. 100 KIOPs, ca. 600 MB/s
6140 / ca. 200 KIOPs, ca. 1000 MB/s

CU
lowbyte

Thanks for the information lowbyte

Is it safe to assume then that two 2540's would perform 200 KIOPs, ca. 1200 MB/s ? I'm trying to compare the performance of two 2540's vs one 6140.

Two fully populated 2540's (24x73 15Krpm) is going to cost roughly $15k, while one fully populated 6140 price is around $27k.

Thanks again.

-bv

Hey all,

another point for the discussion is how many controllers in the storage you plan.
Both 2540 and 6140 can be ordered with one or two controllers, if you use two
controllers in the 2540 you may be faster than a 6140 with one controller. Otherwise
the 6140 will be faster. The internal design of the boxes differs a little bit, cause the
2540 based on SAS-Disks, there is no second line to the disk backplane, so the
second controller is only for failover, multipathing will not speed up the box.
The 6140 has two pathes to the disk backplane, so every controller has its own
path, this will increase the speed by multipathing.

A 2540 with a 2501 expansion tray will not double the performance, the IOPs and
MB thrugh is limited by the controller.
Its a very good idea, get the boxes via try and buy and test yourself.

Happy testing
lowbyte

Thank you everyone.

I have reached out to sun again, and will use the try & buy process as well. I've never had much success with the loaner pool.

We're going to test two 2540's, not (one + 1 expansion shelf), but two seperate 2540's each with it's own controller and HBA to the host. The 2540's will each have 1 x 512 MB Cache FC HW RAID Controller, and 12x73gb 15k sas drives... everything's going to be running RAID 10

The 6140 will have 2 controllers, for a total cache of 2GB, 12x73gb 15k fc-al
one HBA to the host... i'm sure we'll try it with two HBA's too..

The host will be a X4150, with 8 cores, 8gb ram, and 8x72GB 15Krpm sas drives too.

We'll play around with a bunch of configs and see what happens.

I think we'll be maxing out all the pic-e slots ..

I will do my best to post some results here. It may be a while. The try&buy process can take a while at times.

-bv

Just curious if you've had a chance to do your testing yet...

As a side note, Sun's loaner pool has essentially dried up. I attended one of the "Blackbox" presentations that Brian Wilson put on and asked him about it. He told me that Sun's "bean counters" decided it was losing money, so they cut the program. However, he did basically say to feel free to use and abuse the try and buy program because that's what it's there for...

Back on topic, we've been using a lot of 2540's but may have a need for the 6140's soon, so I'm interested in your results as well.

are you running single or dual path? that makes a difference too