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Adaptec Delivers Better SATA and SAS Performance for Real-World Workloads
The latest family of Adaptec Unified Serial™ RAID controllers for PCIe is also the latest Adaptec product line to combine the most advanced data protection with better performance for real-world workloads for both Serial ATA (SATA) and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives. In testing against LSI, 3ware, and Promise on common tasks including file serving, web serving, online transaction processing, and workstations, Adaptec outperformed the competition. Our newest Unified Serial controllers are ideal for storing digital media, creating virtual tape library backups, serving up files for a workgroup server, and many other day-to-day tasks that benefit from better performance.
Read on to see how Adaptec Unified Serial RAID controllers perform versus competitors in real workload scenarios.
Adaptec Performance by Storage Server Applications and Usage Models
Although every storage server is unique, there are many common characteristics among the most popular usage models.
File Server
File servers present a special challenge since user requests tend to be scattered across the span of the disks, with distinct hot spots. These hot spots, which typically contain file information structures, open-file updates, page swapping regions, and other frequently accessed data, benefit from effective array caching. The busiest file servers need to service thousands of requests each second. Ideal RAID controllers for file serving demonstrate the ability to handle a greater number of user requests, which translates to lower response times on even your most demanding file servers.
Web Server
Today’s high-speed world of e-commerce requires storage that can service multiple customer web requests with the lowest possible latency. Both static and dynamic workloads are comprised almost exclusively of read requests with generally random I/O distributions. Studies have shown that approximately 84% of web server request sizes fall below 16KB, while the remaining 16% is evenly distributed from 32KB to1MB (consisting primarily of video, audio, and images).The best web server performance can be achieved with RAID controllers with a dynamic caching policy that reduces the controller overhead when dealing with overlapping read and write requests. RAID enhances web server performance by distributing the requests across all the participating drives, significantly increasing performance while also improving availability and reliability. Online Transaction Processing (OLTP)
Our digital economy has become more reliant on storage systems for archiving online transactions and vital records — such as database applications including decision support/data warehousing, web-based e-commerce, and business reporting.Transaction processing and database query I/O requests tend to be small, generally less than 16KB, requiring a read of the original value, followed by an update, write, and verify operation. Because transaction servers are highly sensitive to response times, the ability to preserve data integrity by maintaining in order execution (to ensure atomicity) of requests for a mixed read/write workload, while minimizing controller overhead, is key to a high performing database. Workstation
The nature of the workstation environment consists primarily of a single user running multiple applications, which operate in such a way as to leverage the virtual memory subsystem (VMS). Workstation workloads are predominantly a mix of random accesses of blocks that match the VMS’s page granularity, with a sequential component of read and write disk stores once the task is finished. In this case, since the user is essentially waiting for the disk operation to complete before being able to continue, latency again is very important. |