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14 BP1038| Best Practices and Guidelines for Integrating the Dell EqualLogic FS7600 and FS7610 into an Existing SAN
7 Test results and analysis
Note: The results provided in this paper are intended for the purpose of comparing the specific
configurations used in our lab environment. The results do not portray the maximum capabilities of any
system, software, or storage.
7.1 Small block results with shared versus separate pool design
For the combined block and file tests, the tests were run at various block sizes from 4K to 256K. Similar
scaling results were achieved over each block size although only the results from particular tests may be
shown in this paper. One example of the results is shown in Figure 3, which shows the IOPS performance
achieved with the configured workload using an I/O request size of 4K while the FS7600 shared the
storage pool with the block clients. As expected, because the number of block and file clients were varied
in each test, the block heavy mix shows more total block IOPS (with 16 block clients) versus the file heavy
mix which only used eight block clients. Conversely, the file heavy mix shows a higher percentage of IOPS
from the file clients.
Figure 3 4K IOPS performance with FS7600 in shared pool
However, with the file heavy mix, the overall total number of IOPS (with both file and block combined) is
greater than with the block heavy workload mix because of the ability to cache more of the active data on
the FS7600.