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15 BP1038| Best Practices and Guidelines for Integrating the Dell EqualLogic FS7600 and FS7610 into an Existing SAN
When the same tests were run with the FS7600 configured in a separate pool (as shown in Figure 4), the
block clients were able to scale slightly higher than with the shared pool, even though the separate pool
only has half the number of arrays than were available with the shared pool design. This indicates that
sharing the pool with the FS Series NAS Appliance can affect the performance of existing block hosts. This
occurs because in a shared pool design, volumes from both block and file may reside on the same set of
physical disks which can create contention and increase disk latency (or response time) under heavier
workloads.
Figure 4 4K IOPS performance with FS7600 in separate pools
The separate pool test results also show that the FS7600 was able to scale similarly to the results seen with
a shared pool when the file heavy workload mix was run. In the case of the block heavy mix, the file clients
performed better in the shared pool design where more arrays, and therefore more disk spindles, were
available.
7.2 Large block results with shared versus separate pool design
For workloads that consist of larger I/O sizes (such as backup and media streaming workloads), the
network throughput delivered is a better performance indicator. In Figure 5 the results from the block
heavy and file heavy tests are shown when the I/O request size from the Vdbench block and file clients
was 128K. For these results, the throughput is shown in MB/sec.
With the block heavy mix, the total throughput numbers exceeded that of the file heavy mix. In both the
block heavy and file heavy mix, the portion of throughput resulting from the file clients is similar though,
which means the difference was mostly due to the increased block performance from additional block