I had a chance to test HP Smart Array P800 SAS RAID controller with HP Proliant DL380 G5 server with the following configurations:
- Dual Quad Core 2.5Ghz
- 32-GB RAM
- P800 Smart array with SAS interface
- 25 disks, 10K RPM, 146G each
- 512M cache
- Battery backed
Here is the sysbench fileio random write performance numbers for RAID-10 with the following configuration:
- 18 disks, ext3 noatime, nodiratime (mirrored)
- 0% read, 100% write cache
- 64K strip size
- Battery enabled
- 16K block size (sysbench)
| threads | sync – rndwr (reqs/sec) | direct – rndwr(reqs/sec) |
| 1 | 4690 | 4502 |
| 4 | 5556 | 5203 |
| 16 | 5560 | 5233 |
| 32 | 5559 | 5204 |
Overall the numbers seems to be reasonable for pure random writes with 64K strip size. The same configuration with RAID-5 drops the write performance by 1/4th. The controller does not provide a way to configure the cache burst time, and it automatically controls the cache and evenly distributes to other volumes.
Overall HP P800 might be a good choice for database workloads as it has 25 SAS disks support (depending on enclosure ) in a affordable price, even though 15K disks price to 10K price is wide; and people can simply add more 10K disks than buying fewer 15K
HP P800 Smart Array Performance: I had a chance to test HP Smart Array P800 SAS RAID controller with HP Proliant.. http://tinyurl.com/dge57q
Did you had a chance to compare with Dell’s PERC SAS controller ?
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/products/Controllers/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=biz&cs=555&sku=341-6316
[...] file IO performance numbers from DELL MD1120 SAS storage array. Last year I did the same test with HP P800 storage array and numbers were impressive. But when it comes to this high end storage array, few surprises. [...]
P800 actually supports over 100 SAS disks, 2 * MSA70 daisy-chained one each external port and normally 8 internal disks in the server itself.
[...] p800 Array Controller venublog.com [...]