For what it is worth, as we increased the number of gig attached clients (opterons of course) we have seen a huge performance degredation hitting R series filers running with ATA drives. Our shop is quite a bit larger than yours and I don't know how your clients are attached so it might work quite nicely for you. The apps you are running might also be kinder to your ATA drives than the EDA apps we run.

ATA is a good choice in some environments but for larger shops running large, random IO type applications it might not work as well.

As with anything... you milage may vary. C-

PS... Yes, I am being intentionally vague about what we run and the number of machines we have.

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 11:10:50AM -0500, Andrew Siegel wrote:

We have great performance with both FC and ATA drives. We have 1600 Opterons randomly reading and writing NFS data 24/7 from 5 filers (2 R200s with ATA, 1 FAS3020 with ATA, and 2 FAS3050 with FC), and when we hit the limits on the filers, it is almost always filer CPU horsepower. Our filer cache hit rates fluctuate in the high 90-percent range on all heads. The only time I've seen poor performance on our ATAs was when I had too few spindles in a traditional volume.

I think that the 3020 with ATA drives is a great performer for the price.

Andrew Siegel Head of Systems Blue Sky Studios, Inc. 44 South Broadway, 17th floor White Plains, NY 10601 914-259-6336 direct 914-259-6500 main 914-259-6499 fax abs@blueskystudios.com

Glenn Walker wrote:

...

With 10,000 home directories and 10k CIFS ops/s, I'd have to assume that you'd be pulling quite a bit of data from the filer (ie, not the same data repeatedly) and thusly hitting disks pretty heavily. Given this, I don't know that I would feel comfortable using ATA disks - they don't handle random workloads very well (sequential workloads are wonderful on these disks, however).

The FAS3050 will have better performance characteristics than the FAS940. Given this, you can probably be safe following the same type of disk config currently in place in the FAS940.

While you state that you use close to the max raid group size, I hope that you are using RAIDDP to make up for increased probability of dual-disk failure... better safe than sorry :)

Glenn

-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Jeff Burton Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2006 4:14 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: FAS3050 disk shelf performance

Does anyone have performance stats, or opinions about performance, across the different disk configs available (250GB ATA, 300GB FC, 144GB FC, 72GB FC) on the FAS3050?

We are going to be bringing in a few FAS3050c's and I'm contemplating going with either 300GB FC or 250GB ATA. The plan is to put semi-archive data and active Windows user home directories on there. Currently we are using a FAS940c for the 10,000 home directories and it doesn't break a sweat outside of backups. I'm expecting about 12,000 active connections split between the 2 cluster nodes and about 9k-10k CIFS OPS, along with 1k-2k NFS OPS. I know the FAS3050 can handle it per specfs (and common sense), but of course I'm not going to 15K 72GB disks as they did in the benchmark. Would my users see a slight delay if I go with ATA? With ATA will the minra=off be a good idea even though my cache stats warrant it to be on per NetApp's recommendation? Will there even be that much of a cost savings with ATA considering RAID sets must be must smaller than with FC disks? (We use close to the max RAID size since these areas can deal with the 24 hour outage to recover the data). Thanks all, Jeff