Using Sun E420R with Diff SCSI CLARiiON?

[nsew45]

I am using a Sun E420R, Solaris 8 with a Diff SCSI 20 Slot CLARiioN with two SP, 16Mb cache,populated with 18Gb 7200 RPM drives. It seems to write slow to the disks on the CLARiiON by 2x for example:

I found three files:

786440192 system01.dbf
786440192 system02.dbf
524296192 system04.dbf
---------
2097176576 Total

I transferred them using a script using rcp over the gigabit ethernet from moes disk subsystem to the internal disk on larry.

moe:/# ./speedtest.sh
Thu Sep 27 15:50:17 CDT 2001 Moe /u07/oradata/CPX to Larry /usr/local/bin
Thu Sep 27 15:54:03 CDT 2001
moe:/#

about 3:42

I transferred the same files using rcp over the gigabit ethernet from larry's internal disk to moes CLARiiON disk subsystem.

larry:/# ./speedtest.sh
Thu Sep 27 15:55:01 CDT 2001 Larry /usr/local/bin to moe:/u08/oradata/test
Thu Sep 27 16:02:33 CDT 2001
larry:/#

about 7:32

I transferred the same files using rcp over the gigabit ethernet from larry's internal disk to moes internal disk.

larry:/# ./speedtest.sh
Thu Sep 27 16:23:19 CDT 2001 Larry /usr/local/bin to moe:/var/adm/system
Thu Sep 27 16:25:29 CDT 2001
larry:/#

about 2:10

Not a surprise. It takes a lot longer to write to the old 7200 rpm disks on the old CLARiON.

However, even at 7:32 for 2GB, 9GB should have only taken 35-40 minutes, certainly under an hour, not 4 hours.

Any ideas?

 

[bjverzal]

What is your connection to the Clariion ? F/W SCSI, Ultra, Ultra2, Ultra3, Fiber, Iscsi ?

Bill.

 

[nsew45]

Differential SCSI.

 

[bjverzal]

That is fine, but is it Ultra, Ultra2 or Ultra3 ? For that matter, it can even be Fast and Wide.

Differential is a bus-type. Different than Single-Ended (another bus-type). However, differential and single-ended can be either Fast-Wide, Ultra, Ultra2 or Ultra3.

Bill.

 

[nsew45]

The SCSI card on the Sun E420 is a dual channel ultraSCSI. The SCSI interface on the CLARiiON is wide SCSI. There is a specific set of prerequisites to installing ATF and those are set.

 

[impeachhillary]

Do you know if you have your write-cache enabled or disabled? In a 20 bay, the first 5 drives installed in slots A0 B0 C0 D0 E0 enable your cache vault therefore enabling your write cache.

 

[nsew45]

Write cache is enabled. There is not a lot of cache, but I do have some of it write enabled. I will double check it.

 

[impeachhillary]

I would dedicate all of your cache for writing and zero out the read portion, just to see if it improves some. Also, you may want to make sure all of your cache vault disks are rated at 7200 RPM. A mixture of 5400 and 7200 may result in lag times in your writes (I remember reading about this years ago). Does the Clariion show an amber light illuminated on the front? Also, what is the microcode level this unit is running? This will tell me the type of Storage Processor you have installed in your unit.

 

[buzz65]

Did you get this resolved? I have the exact same issue with slow write times on the CLARiiON.