HP Auto Port Aggregation Performance and Scalability

Introduction
HP Auto Port Aggregation is a software product that creates link aggregates, often called “trunks,” which
provide a logical grouping of two or more physical ports into a single “fat pipe.” Two primary features are
automatic link failure detection and recovery as well as support for load balancing of network traffic across
all of the links in the aggregation. This enables you to build large bandwidth logical links into the server that
are highly available and completely transparent to the client and server applications.
This white paper presents the exceptional performance and scalability testing results for the HP Auto Port
Aggregation (HP APA) product. It also provides system setup and configuration recommendations to help
you achieve similar results to suit your business needs.
Executive Summary
The HP APA product, when set up and used in the configurations described in this white paper, consistently
provided sustained link rate performance for various workloads with two, four, and eight Gigabit Ethernet
ports in a single link aggregate.
The exceptional performance results presented in this paper were measured on a 16-processor HP Integrity
rx8620 server running HP-UX 11i v2 and other software performance and scalability enhancements to the
networking stack. The high-performance HP ProCurve 3400cl-24G switch has the switching capacity needed
to sustain the heavy loads generated by these tests.
The following figure shows the sustained link rate throughput of three different link aggregates under a
unidirectional workload. Throughput is a measure of how well programs run with a specific workload and
how quickly the programs can service user requests.
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2-port Gigabit Aggregation 4-port Gigabit Aggregation 8-port Gigabit Aggregation
Percentage of Individual Port Throughput
You can expect to see similar results on other HP servers running HP-UX, including those running HP-UX 11i
v1 with the corresponding performance and scalability enhancements to the networking stack.
NOTE In this paper, the unidirectional link rate of a single Gigabit port is 948 Mb/s. When multiple Gigabit
ports are mentioned, the unidirectional link rate is taken as n*948 Mb/s, where n is the number of
unaggregated individual Gigabit Ethernet ports used in the comparison.
Introduction 7