The HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) product family offers midsize to enterprise size customers leading performance, high capacity, and high-availability storage solutions for reducing IT costs and complexity. The EVA provides virtualized storage enabling capacity pooling, simplified management, automatic performance load balancing, dynamic configuration, and re-configuration.
HP StorageWorks 4400 Enterprise Virtual Array
(EVA4400) performance white paper
Introduction......................................................................................................................................... 2 Sizing up performance numbers ............................................................................................................ 2 End-to-end performance numbers ....................................................................................................... 3 Cache performance numbers............................................................................................................. 3 EVA4400 performance summary........................................................................................................... 3 EVA4400 and EVA4100 differentiation ............................................................................................. 4 Experimental setup description........................................................................................................... 4 Measurement criteria .................................................................................................................... 4 Measurement results ..................................................................................................................... 5 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................... 9 For more information.......................................................................................................................... 10 Introduction
The HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) product family offers midsize to enterprise size customers leading performance, high capacity, and high-availability storage solutions for reducing IT costs and complexity. The EVA provides virtualized storage enabling capacity pooling, simplified management, automatic performance load balancing, dynamic configuration, and re-configuration. Continuing to build on this success is the HP StorageWorks 4400 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA4400). Engineering advancements have enabled substantial real-world performance improvements over the HP StorageWorks 4100 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA4100). The EVA4400's increased levels of sequential performance provide customers with improved data transfer rates for applications such as data warehousing, streaming video, high-performance technical computing, and backups and restores. In random workloads, the EVA4400 performance scales up to the maximum number of disk drives supported. Customers will have the predictability they need to choose configurations that best match actual business conditions. Increased random workload performance translates into better throughputs and response times for applications such as files systems, transaction-orientated databases, and email. This white paper provides a high-level overview of the: . Importance and differences related to cache and end-to-end performance numbers . Performance summary associated with the EVA4400
Sizing up performance numbers
The HP StorageWorks research and development (R&D) philosophy embodies two important tenets: . Create products that deliver value and quality to the customer. (This tenet guides HP decision-making for deploying cutting-edge technology.) . Build trust by using testing procedures that, within normal engineering constraints, customers can verify and repeat at their place of business. (Many HP customers refer to HP as their "trusted advisor," and have "bet their business" on HP technology. HP enables customers to substantiate any claims by using test procedures that customers can repeat and verify at their site.)
When reporting performance numbers for an array, HP has found that the most useful numbers for customers are those associated with workload configuration and other characteristics that reflect actual business conditions. For the purposes of this paper, HP refers to the performance numbers that exercise both the normal data path and the normal code path as "end-to-end" performance numbers. A normal data path includes the array's Fibre Channel connections to servers, cache, internal buses, and disk drives. The normal code path includes software or firmware that moves user data between its disk drives and the servers that connect to the array. "Cache" performance numbers are th... [download for more]
