hIOmon^™

  The File I/O Performance Monitor

Making data perform^SM

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Architecture

Server platforms within the Open Systems computer marketplace span a diverse range of feature, functionality and cost.  Even the motherboards incorporated into the server platform can be vendor-unique (e.g., HP) or commodity-based (e.g., the Intel packaged motherboards).  Some aspects that require careful consideration due to their potential impact upon server I/O include:

• The number and type of (presumably) PCI bus slots.  Additional PCI-related factors include whether or not these bus slots are segregated into more than one PCI bus segment.

• The particular placement and type of I/O adapters inserted into the PCI bus slots; various system issues (such as load balancing) can be impacted by the selection and placement of the I/O adapters.

• Integration of the I/O adapters upon the motherboard itself (rather than upon a separate I/O adapter PCI card).

• Overall system issues such as a balanced hardware component set (including microprocessors, system memory, chipsets, PCI bus and I/O adapter cards, all of which are taken into consideration from a system-level perspective).  Especially crucial is the cross compatibility (i.e., all of these system components play well together).  Software components (such as Operating System, BIOS, device drivers, etc.) add additional complications to this cross compatibility. 

The HP web site includes white papers which discuss some server-based I/O performance tuning considerations.

InfoLinks

Interfaces

Software

The Host Bus Adapter (also known as the Host Adapter Board) is the system component (often an I/O adapter card which plugs into a PCI bus slot) that resides within the server platform and provides the interface between the system memory and the storage peripheral.  There are a number of different types and vendors of HBAs.  Some HBAs supply only the basic functionality needed to attach and access storage peripherals (vendors include QLogic, Adaptec, and Emulex).  Other HBAs provide additional functionality such as data caching and RAID controller processing (vendors include LSI Logic).  Some HBAs are essentially integrated upon the server motherboard (vendors include LSI Logic, Adaptec, and QLogic).

Some of the more sophisticated HBAs (e.g., LSI Logic) incorporate their own dedicated processor which not only manages the I/O interface but allows for additional value-added features.  Note: IBM/Mylex was acquired by LSI Logic.

Recent product announcements have included support for 4 Gigabit Fibre Channel interfaces.  The SANblade QLE2462 from QLogic not only supports dual-port 4 Gigabit Fibre Channel, but also supports 4x PCI-Express and SCSI-FCP, IP, and FICON protocols.

iSCSI enables the SCSI protocol to be transported over the IP network, thus allowing block-level storage traffic to travel through general-purpose IP data networks.  Moreover, iSCSI facilitates IP SAN solutions as a potential alternative to Fibre Channel based SANs.

SANRAD is an IP SAN company that has developed iSCSI storage solutions that are secure and manageable.  SANRAD's iSCSI and IP SAN solutions allow you to manage your IP storage network easily and effectively.     

Several vendors offer hard disk drives that support the SCSI Ultra3/Ultra160 and Ultra320 specifications; these vendors include Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital.

There are also disk drives available that support the Fibre Channel interface.  Both Hitachi (Ultrastar) and Seagate (Cheetah and Barracuda) have disk drives with 2 Gigabit Fibre Channel interfaces, thus doubling the theoretical maximum data rate to 200 MB/second (or 400 MB/second duplex).

By combining multiple HDDs into an array of HDDs, RAID provides the potential for appreciable performance gains.  The various RAID levels (RAID.edu) differ, however, in terms of high availability/reliability, overhead/expense, effective capacity and associated performance; consequently, the RAID levels exhibit different performance characteristics. The hIOmon™ File I/O Performance Monitor can assist with better exploiting and managing performance in RAID subsystems through optimum file placement, by helping to determine, for example, the placement of specific files within the appropriate RAID levels.

For exceptional performance, some RAID storage subsystems (such as the FlashAccess™ support offered by Hitachi, e.g., the HDS Models 9500 and 9900 V) allow data/LUNs to be dynamically "locked" into and "unlocked" from the subsystem cache.  By measuring and monitoring specific file I/O performance, hIOmon™ can help easily identify those particular files that might best take advantage of such performance enhancements.     

Designed, manufactured and marketed by Texas Memory Systems, Inc, (www.superSSD.com), the RamSan™ family of Solid State Disks for storage networks provides the lightning fast performance of SDRAM without the volatility typically associated with such technology.  As 'The World's Fastest Storage®', the RamSan SSD offers high bandwidth with very low latency for applications requiring the fastest disk I/O performance.  As a hyperI/O^sm partner, TMS promotes the use of the hIOmon™ File I/O Performance Monitor to locate those specific files that need the high performance of RamSan and to monitor file I/O performance so that the RamSan SSD can be utilized to its fullest extent.

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