Real-World Application Benchmarks - HP LeftHand P4000 - SAN Solutions Application Notes

The LeftHand Networks SAN is designed to work on your existing Ethernet
infrastructure. Segmenting the storage network from your corporate network
is recommended, and boosts overall performance of the solution. For
performance testing, the SAN network was isolated to a single broadcast
domain (subnet) and had dedicated NICs for the storage traffic. A single 24
port Gigabit switch was used for all tests.
All disk volumes were configured using the Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator
Version 2.0.4. Volumes were mounted using the Windows Logical Disk
Manager and formatted with NTFS using the default allocation unit size.

Real-World Application Benchmarks

All of the following benchmarks were designed to help characterize the actual
performance users can expect in similar production environments. Each
benchmark measures different storage characteristics. Standard SQL server
and Exchange benchmarks illustrate the expected performance in those
application environments. Simple file copies show throughput in megabytes
per second (MB/sec) and IOmeter simulates IOPS (inputs/outputs per second)
and throughput.
Microsoft SQLIOStress
The SQLIOStress utility was written and is maintained by the Microsoft SQL
Server Escalation staff. Designed to help detect possible I/O path problems
that would lead to Microsoft SQL Server data corruption or loss, it emulates
different SQL server database versions and types and reports on some basic
benchmarks. At a minimum it runs 5 iterations. Only the third and fourth
iterations should be used for comparing performance according to the
SQLIOStress tool documentation. For this document the 4th iteration will be
used. The SQLIOStress test runs from only a single host and typically
becomes CPU bound. The tool is not capable of scaling at the same rate as the
SAN. Some scaling is achieved on a single host due to the lower latency in
the SAN.
Best Practice - Keep the data files and logs for SQL databases on
separate volumes.
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