Backup setup for two HP Microserver Gen8 NAS servers – part2

By | February 10, 2015

This is a followup of the first post Backup setup for two HP Microserver Gen8 NAS servers .

The new HBA arrived , an HP LSI 9217-4i4e 8-port SAS 6Gb/s RAID Card which is in fact the HP OEM version of the LSI 9207. The positive: it came with three different SAS to 4xSATA cables. The negative: it came only with a standard profile pci bracket. I had to do some engineering magic involving the bending on the bracket and a wire to keep it in place. Not nice but effective.

The following further changes were done:

  1. I installaed the HP LSI 9217-4i4e 8-port SAS 6Gb/s RAID Card into NAS2 and moved the SAS cable of the drive cage on the new HBA. Thus all 4 drive bays have a 6Gb/s connection.
  2. I moved the OS SSD from NAS 2 on the B120i HBA port 0 from the ODD port.

On NAS2 is definitely a visible change.

  • hdparm -Tt /dev/sda , where sda is the SSD device,  reports a Timing buffered disk read of : 314.34 MB/sec much better than the original 147 MB/sec when SSD was on the ODD port.
  • hdparm -Tt /dev/md127 , where md127 is the RAID1 device of the two 3TB WD red disks, reports a Timing buffered disk read of : 147.47 MB/sec. This is an improvement over the original 125MB/sec when md127 disks were on the B120i HBA.

As a result now NAS1 and NAS2 have an almost identical disk performance.

To test the NFS transfer speed:

nas1# rsync -ah /media/storage-nas2/test.file /tmp/test.file

where /media/storage-nas2/ is the NFS mount directory of the storage from NAS2

In the previous setup I obtained a 115 MB/sec transfer rate.

After the HBA was added now I get the following result for a 4.5GB file transferred between NAS2 and NAS1 : 142.81 MB/sec.

This is in fact much higher than the 80 MB/sec required by my LTO-4 tape drive. A 142.81 MB/sec can accomodate now even a LTO-6 tape drive.

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