I would say for the same Raid10, a XV equals to 3E and 1.5X.

Finally, 10 to 20 IOPS may be right on average, but backup windows can easily use upto 100-150 IOPS each.

We did go for XV in R10, if more space is required, we can simply expand it on-line to R50 (ie, double the space that is.)

Hope this helps.

2) Yah the testserver only have 4 nics, 1 for vmotion, 1 for ethernet and 2 for iscsi.

3) yup gonna be cool!

4) Its run on a HDD mounted directly in VMDK

My Comments:

1. The second line is the most important part especially IOPS number (Av. MB/sek doesn’t matter in this case) people look at as it simulates the real world VM loading. (ie, mostly Random)

RealLife-60%Rand-65%Read……____5,05__……….___6017___………_____47,01___

Your number for Av. Resp. Time ms and Av. IOs/sek R50 aren’t bad at all with 3 PS6000XV, oh one more thing, do you really find linear performance gain with you added the 2nd and 3rd box?

2. Max Throughput-100%Read, are you using Only 2 NICs for iSCSI? Seemed it tops at 200MB/s, so if you have 4 NICs, you will definitely boost the whole thing over 13,000 IOPS.

Btw, if you change the testing client to R710 with 5600 Xeon or R910 with latest Xeon, your performance will get even higher as I found testing client also plays a big role in the final result.

3. Yes, MEM and VAAI is really lovely!!! (I have another blog entry, search for VAAI offload) and I am waiting EQL to release their Thin-Provisioning Reclaim feature in coming FW5.x and that will really help in our environment.

4. I assume your testing machine is a VM and you directly attached to EQL SAN from within that VM right? In my case, it’s different, I simply just test the VM’s own VMFS which is on EQL SAN.

Mind that i am running Raid50, i unfortunately cannot change our production enviroment to run Raid10

MEM seems to deliver alot of performance, and MUCH bettr response times!!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
TABLE oF RESULTS With MEM (2NIC) 3xPS6000XV
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SERVER TYPE: VM or PHYS.
CPU TYPE / NUMBER: VCPU / 2
HOST TYPE: Dell R900, 8GB RAM; 4×4Core 2200mhz
STORAGE TYPE / DISK NUMBER / RAID LEVEL: EQL PS6000XV x 3 / 3×14+2 Disks / R50

##################################################################################
TEST NAME——————-Av. Resp. Time ms——Av. IOs/sek——-Av. MB/sek——
##################################################################################

Max Throughput-100%Read……..___9,33___……….___6200___………____193,92___

RealLife-60%Rand-65%Read……____5,05__……….___6017___………_____47,01___

Max Throughput-50%Read……….____6,67__……….___8909___………____278,41__

Random-8k-70%Read……………..___5,14__……….__6191___………____48,37____

EXCEPTIONS: CPU Util. 30,39,26,38%;

##################################################################################

Ive tested with MEM and Vsphere 4.1 on a Dell R900, with the standard 4GB file, and im not seeing the same results you are..

I will post my numbers when ive run the final test in about an hour or two

FYI, EQL 6000XV has 2GB cache on each active controller, but still, I will give it another try.