MD3600i - first impressions

[jpeake]

Got my new array yesterday. MD3600i, 10Gbe single controller, 12 X 3TB 7200 NL SAS drives. I set it to RAID 10, which yields a bit over 16TB usable after formatting in Win 2012.

My Veeam server is a HP Proliant DL360 G5, 8 core Xeon @ 2.5 Ghz, 12GB RAM. quad port 1GB NIC to the EqualLogic SAN (using EqualLogc MPIO), dual port Intel to the 10Gb MD array (single port active), and dual port Broadcom to the LAN

Iometer results are:
Seq Read (4k) - 65MB/s,16,600 IOPS
Seq Read (64K) - 440MB/s, 7,100 IOPS
Seq Write (4k) - 75MB/s, 19,000 IOPS
Seq Write (64K) - 360MB/s, 5,800 IOPS

Veeam seems to really like it. I did some active fulls last night (dedupe on, comp off, LAN target) , it took 12 hours for 5TB worth of VM's. Processing rate was between 100 - 200 MB/s most of the time. Exchange server DB and logs were over 300 MB/s for some reason. The slowest part was 1.5 TB worth of file share/home drives. That took 5 hours.

Played around with SureBackup today, and it runs fine on the array. Had to tweak a couple of servers for a longer boot timeout, no fault of the array.

I am enabling Windows 2012 dedupe on it, will see how that goes.

[Gostev]

Nice. From the last sentence, I understand you are using it as a backup storage?
I am ears to hear your results with Windows Server 2012 dedupe on.

Exchange logs compress well, so source-side ompression really boosts the performance.
On the other hand, home folders probably mostly contains stuff that does not compress well.