On Tue, 11 Jul 2000, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:
Thanks also to Todd for his input on increasing system RAM. I've since found out that a C720 has 16Mb NVRAM, 512MB System which means it only has half the NVRAM of its big brothers.. is this also upgradeable to increase performance? Presumably if so this would increase the drive's read/write speed plus increase the capacity in the case of a filer?
Do the C720's have the sysstat command? If you're doing a "lot" of writes (for large values of "lot"), more NVRAM will probably benefit you.
Is the box CPU bound (again, sysstat)? Filers are good in general up to about 70-80%, we've found, and then performance starts to suffer. They really hurt at 95-100%; ask me how I know. ;)
On Tue, 11 Jul 2000, Gregory T Rotunda wrote:
the thing as well... I think that the biggest thing about trying to go about "improving things" is to understand the basics of how to monitor the performance of the filer.
Amen. To that end, I signed up for NetApp's 202 class (I think that's the number...) next week. I hope to get all kinds of useful info on what's available to measure, what things to look for for trouble, etc. Will report back at the end of July...
adjusting network, configs, or anything- you're going to have to understand how to read the cards after you work your magic.
I would strongly add you should get a baseline *before* you change things, too. That way, you can tell if you're change really did any good, in addition to "gut feel" and system and interactive response, which is immeasureable.
This whole thing is probably way too easy for the guys on this list, who've been working with servers and UNIX their whole adult lives, but for newbies like me... I guess I need to get a copy of "Performance Monitoring for Dummies" and let it ride.
You can't be a dummy if you want/need to tweak these things! NetApp designs them out of the box for dummies [0]; to go beyond that, you need some smarts, Gregory! ;)
There's a book by Adrian Cockroft called something like Performance Tuning. It's geared towards Sun boxes and is (obviously) UNIX but the methodology and philosophy carries over quite a bit to filers. Filers are nothing but CPU's and disks and I/O channels, too.
[0] This is not a jab at NetApp; on the contrary, it's a tribute to the design. In 5 minutes with less than a half-dozen numbers (IP address, default router, etc.), you can have a file server on your network. Try installing any UNIX or NT and getting it set up in that amount of time!
Until next time...
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