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16 BP1038| Best Practices and Guidelines for Integrating the Dell EqualLogic FS7600 and FS7610 into an Existing SAN
clients (in the block heavy workload mix). Even when the number of file clients doubled in the file heavy
mix, the portion of file I/O did not increase, indicating that the file VM clients were limited and unable to
provide additional throughput with this workload.
Figure 5 Throughput (MB/sec) with 128K I/O request in shared pool
Looking at the results in Figure 6, the maximum performance of the block I/O in a separate pool exceeded
the results achieved when the block volumes shared the pool with the NAS reserve. In some cases
increasing the number of disk spindles results in an increase in throughput too, however in this case
mixing block and file I/O types affected the performance of the block clients. With larger I/O sizes,
contention can occur at the physical disk or in the cache memory on the array members as well.
When comparing the file heavy mix in Figure 5 and Figure 6, the portion of file I/O remains fairly consistent
whether using a shared or separate pool design. This is largely due to the presence of additional cache
memory on the FS Series NAS Appliances. However, when comparing the block heavy mixes, the file I/O
performance is slightly better in the shared pool design, similar to the results demonstrated by the small
block workload. In general, when block and NAS volumes are placed into separate pools, the performance
is more predictable and scales more evenly.