Initial results for 60 bay unit running a software RAID

Our new JackRabbit tightly coupled storage and computing unit is on the test track, and about to go out the door to a customer. Need a few minutes with it, after quick tuning to generate some performance data. This is a single 4U server unit with 1/4 PB within it. Streaming 1TB from disk. This is using our tuned software RAID6. Our hardware accelerated RAID results will be generated later in the next batch of tests with new units we are building. Use these as a lower bound on performance.

Run status group 0 (all jobs):
   READ: io=1023.9GB, aggrb=7270.2MB/s, minb=7270.2MB/s, maxb=7270.2MB/s, mint=144216msec, maxt=144216msec

This is so far out of cache its simply not funny. 144 seconds to read 1TB. Then a streaming write, same size.

Run status group 0 (all jobs):
  WRITE: io=1023.6GB, aggrb=3471.6MB/s, minb=3471.6MB/s, maxb=3471.6MB/s, mint=301904msec, maxt=301904msec

Also not bad, and again, as this is software RAID, we should be able to do quite a bit better with the hardware acceleterated RAID. But still, its pretty reasonable as a start. In the configuration we have in place, this is 48 effective data drives (RAID6 each with 1 hot spare, 14 RAID6 drives for 12 effective data drives per LUN, with 4 LUNs per unit). All this said, these make for some very nice parallel file system building blocks.