Two-Stripe HPSS transfers, FibreChannel disks, Gigabit Ethernet jumbo frames
ORNL's Probe installation includes two Sun T300 FibreChannel disk arrays (arranged in RAID-5, 7+1 configuration), an IBM RS/6000 model S80 server with two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and an IBM RS/6000 model H70 server with two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. The disk arrays are connected to the S80 via independent FibreChannel interfaces. We therefore have two complete and independent hardware paths from the disks through the S80 to the H70.
We configured the Ethernet interfaces to use jumbo frames. We then compared the performance of DD (reading and writing raw disks) with HSI (Hierarchical Storage Interface) using one and two disk arrays and the S80's memory.
We then compared the performance of single and dual stripes using HSI and the Parallel FTP utility provided with HPSS. Here the HSI or PFTP application would cause a read to the H70 from disk, or a write from the H70 to disk, with single and dual stripes.