PERFORMANCE OF ACCESS APPLIANCE FOR FLASHARRAY

Pure and Veritas conducted a joint performance study to understand the performance of sending and retrieving snapshots from FlashArray to and from the Access Appliance via the NFS protocol. Table 1 exhibits the maximum throughput results when sending, retrieving and 50%/50% send and retrieve of the volume snapshots between one FlashArray and an Access 3340 Appliance with one shelf. If using a higher model of FlashArray\, the throughput values can be higher. Based on the “sar” and “vxstat” outputs gathered during the testing, the Access Appliance system (CPU, memory, etc.), network and disk utilization were minimal. When another FlashArray was added, performance doubled as expected since the Access Appliance system resources was not overloaded. The overall system utilization on the Access Appliance did increase when two FlashArray were used, however, it did not fully saturate them. Thus, a single Access Appliance is capable of handling multiple FlashArray. Refer to the Appendix section for more details on this performance study.

Table 1- Solution Performance

• Additional testing was conducted to determine the effects when modifying different parameters such as tunables, utilizing multiple FlashArray, multiple network interfaces, etc. A summary of observations includes:

• Best performance was observed when using a rsize=1048576 and wsize=1048576
• Best performance was observed when using NFS version 3 when compared to NFS version 4 protocol.
• When adding another FlashArray to send data to the Access Appliance, the throughput performance doubled. For instance, with 2 FlashArray the combined throughput observed was 457 MB/s when load was sent to 1 node and 1 network interface of the Access Appliance.
• Utilizing a higher model of FlashArray also produced higher results. For instance, utilizing a //FA10-R2, the maximum throughput observed for “Snap to NFS” was 300 MB/s.
• Separating the volumes in different protection groups did not affect the results.
• Performance is improved when distributing the workload across the two nodes, multiple network interfaces and different file systems of the Access Appliance. For example, with 2 FlashArray and when using 1 node, 1 network, and 1 file system on the Access Appliance the throughput was 457 MB/s whereas when using 1 node, 2 filesystems, and 2 network interfaces the combined throughput was 640 MB/s. This is an improvement of 40%.