HP MSA 60 going slow

anything I don't mind

anything I don't mind

anything I don't mind

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I have a HP dl380g5 with a p800 sas controller card going in to a HP MSA60 with 10x300gb 15k sas single port disks.

Basically I am looking for a way to optimize the speed.

At the moment it definitely appears to be under performing for some reason. I am going to replace the battery on the controller as it needs replacing in a few days as well update the firmware on the controller and the hard drives as recommended by hp support. When copying from one partition to the other on the array it goes at 8mbyte a second and drops to 1.5mbyte a second for a 1gb file transfer. This is obviously not optimal i would expect at least 30mbyte a second.

During the day the drive array is not under that much use, it is under use but not so much that i would expect such a slow performance. Doing tests in the evening has similar problems.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsuppor...taskId=&prodSeriesId=3302295&prodTypeId=12169

Fairly recently I used windows disk management and diskpart to extend a partition on the array with some of the unallocated space. That went through without any problems, do you think could have caused it?

The msa60 does not come with a web interface you have to configure it all via the controller which is odd for a san.


The back of the msa 60 there is a sas input and output, what would the output before exactly and any tips on how to improve the speed? My boss suggested defragging the DMS filestore partition but I am not too sure if that is a good idea because i think the DMS guy said that you shouldn't defrag the filestore.
 
The MSA60 is not a SAN in any way shape or form. It is a shelf full of disks, and that's it. The reason it is controlled via the P800 is because there's nothing to control, the P800 sees the individual disks, and you carve them up.

If the battery on the P800 is not working, then that is almost certainly the reason for the poor performance. All caching is disabled as soon as the battery fails, and unfortunately, disk access without caching is hopelessly slow. Replace the battery, wait a couple of hours, and you should see the cache re-enable itself automatically (once the new battery is fully charged), at which point your performance should return to more expected levels.

Extending your partition has nothing to do with the performance problems.

The output is to daisy-chain to another MSA60:
http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Disk-Array/P800-and-MSA60/td-p/4539405#.UIfP3MXA-W0

Re. defragging: if it is a standard NTFS volume, then there's no reason why you shouldn't defrag it. I would ask the vendor to document why defragging is not allowed. By default, Windows 2008 R2 defrags all non-SSD volumes in the background, so is the vendor saying that default Windows behaviour must be changed? Challenge this.
 
Thanks for the great answer!

The OS is currently Windows 2003 sp2. I will replace the battery then asap. As for defrag, ill speak to the DMS guy and see what he says but I think ill probably consider defragging the partitions once the battery has been replaced.
 
Array Accelerator
Array Accelerator Present Yes
Cache Status Enabled, but not currently active due to transformation.
Cache Status Details Cache disabled; low batteries.
Array Accelerator (Cache) Ratio 50% Read / 50% Write
Total Cache Size 512 MB
Cache Backup Power Source Batteries
Battery/Capacitor Pack Count 2
Battery/Capacitor Status Failed (Replace Batteries/Capacitors)

When i spoke to HP they said that the battery issue should not cause it to go slow, i guess he was wrong.

Would it be possible to add an ssd to this array for use as a cache ? Is that possible, worth doing? I just had the thought.
 
What arrays are configured on the MSA?

I'd agree with rotor though - no BB means the write cache will be disabled (unless you force it on at the risk of data loss) and that hurts RAID5 or 6.

I don't think it supports any sort of SSDs.
 
groen said:
When i spoke to HP they said that the battery issue should not cause it to go slow, i guess he was wrong.

Would it be possible to add an ssd to this array for use as a cache ? Is that possible, worth doing? I just had the thought.
Click to expand...

HP guy you spoke to didn't know what he was talking about. =)

You could possible add an SSD or two, but a) you'd be paying HP prices, and b) it's only useful if you have software that can use an SSD cache. The MSA60 / P800 has no way of using the SSDs, apart from you carving them into a virtual disk just like any other disk. i.e. there's no intelligence working in the background to magically use the SSDs to make the whole shebang go faster. I think once you replace the batteries (it has 2), you will be very pleasantly surprised.
 
#Chri5# said:
What arrays are configured on the MSA?

I'd agree with rotor though - no BB means the write cache will be disabled (unless you force it on at the risk of data loss) and that hurts RAID5 or 6.

I don't think it supports any sort of SSDs.
Click to expand...

Doesn't just hurt RAID 5 and 6 (which it does, very badly), it hurts all random access, which is what most disk access is (except maybe for streaming, and even then it's random if the disks are fragmented).
 
Yes, I did not see any way to specify a cache so I thought it was unlikely. But worth asking though, am i correct in saying if i replaced the p800 with a controller that supported ssd cache i could? It is setup in raid 6. Initially it had one 1tb partition and one 750gb partition, but i extended the 1tb partition to the rest of the unallocated space.
 
Last edited:
groen said:
Yes, I did not see any way to specify a cache so I thought it was unlikely. But worth asking though, am i correct in saying if i replaced the p800 with a controller that supported ssd cache i could? It is setup in raid 6. Initially it had one 1tb partition and one 750gb partition, but i extended the 1tb partition to the rest of the unallocated space.
Click to expand...

Now you're talking!

Something like CacheCade (which I've heard about, but no personal experience):
http://www.lsi.com/channel/products/storagesw/Pages/MegaRAIDCacheCadeSoftware2-0.aspx

Read a tonne of reviews first, and make sure it's compatible with the MSA60.

Oh, and let us know what you decide if you do end up going down that road.
 
Just found this.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsuppor...=1157686&prodTypeId=329290&objectID=c02963968
For the current generation of SSD's and Smart Array's, 6 SSD"s is the limit for good performance scalabilty with typical workloads. With a 70/30 read/write workload using 8 KiB requests, the SSD's range from ~8K-12K IOPS per drive and ~6 drives exhaust the ~50K IOPS limit of the Smart Array. More drives can be added for capacity requirements but performance will not scale well after 6 SSD's.
Click to expand...

Seems quite far behind the retail ssd performance? There must be another range ?

That is a lot of IOPS though.
 
groen said:
Just found this.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsuppor...=1157686&prodTypeId=329290&objectID=c02963968


Seems quite far behind the retail ssd performance? There must be another range ?

That is a lot of IOPS though.
Click to expand...

Wow, it goes to show that these controllers are very much last generation. A single modern SSD can do over 80,000 write IOPS!

I reckon something like a CacheCade with 2 SSDs for cache and 4 mirrored 3 TB WD Red drives (giving you 6 TB of usable storage) would vastly outperform what you have, at a tiny fraction of the cost. Just goes to show how rapidly technology is evolving at the moment. It's a very exciting time to be in technology!!
 
The P822 looks to have replaced the P812. The Quick Specs for the P822 say:

P822 includes a PMC-Sierra SRCv 8x6G SAS RAID-on-chip featuring
Click to expand...

A bit of digging turns up this page:

PMC-Sierra, Inc., (Nasdaq:PMCS) or PMC, the semiconductor innovator transforming storage, optical and mobile networks, today announced that its 6Gb/s SAS RAID-on-Chip (RoC) controllers are shipping on new HP ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) servers.
Click to expand...

CacheCade is an LSI thing, and they didn't list HP in their press-release:

SI Corporation (NYSE: LSI) today announced that its SAS storage solutions will power more than 200 new server models based on the recently announced Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 product family. Leading server manufacturers that have selected LSI® 6Gb/s SAS and MegaRAID® solutions to provide accelerated storage performance and enterprise data protection for their next-generation server platforms include Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu Technology Solutions, IBM, Intel, Lenovo and NEC.
Click to expand...

You'd think HP / PMC would be working on a CacheCade competitor but who knows when it might ship.
 
Just had a nightmare of a night. I replaced the battery on the controller and then as on advice from hp and the alerts on the controller it suggest updating the firmware. So I ran the firmware update. After updating the firmware and rebooting the controller would not initialize. This array hosts all the profiles, document store, my documents. I phoned hp and logged a critical fault and after a few hours they called back and suggested removing the cache module and starting it up without it to see if it works. Did not work. So i put it back in and started it up and it worked. They suggested rebooting a few times to make sure but i couldn't do that cause i had to leave and users were making a big deal about the down time.

never updating firmware without their being an specific need for it ever again.
 
Mate, that sounds rough. Glad you got it all back though. To be honest, I've been working with HP kit for many years, and have never seen something like this happen. It could be you had a latent issue and it just came out because of the upgrade/reboot?

In any case, now that it's all working, how's the performance?
 
Rule number one in it is if it ain't broke don't fix it. Very rare for the firmware not to go on smoothly, personally I have done hundreds on hp kit and not had that issue.
 
What time of day did you do this? If people were getting irritated then either you're a 24x7 shop in which case you need better storage, or you did it in the day. Neither are great outcomes.

Did you let the battery charge fully before doing the firmware upgrade?
 
I did it at 7pm we booked a time of 30 min downtime of affected services at that time and it was back up by 7:40 but i made the wrong decision of doing the firmware and that took it out until 22:30. Only one or two users were and email was up but overall could have gone better.

I think possibly why it had such a problem is that the firmware was about 4-5 years old and it went from v4 to v7 so might have been too big of a change and needed the cache module to be reset as a result. Not sure.

Performance is sorted going 50mbyte a second on transfer tests.
 
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