So today it continues. After the dissappointing things that happened around the Promise VTrak m500i we started to put the other machines together to do some testing. Therefore we have:
Machine 1:
Pentium 4 (Prescott) 3 Ghz
2 Gigabyte of RAM
onboard Promise(!) FastTrack 597 SATA
4 Port Onboard SATA
2×80 Gigabyte (Western Digital)
3×250 Gigabyte (Western Digital)
1xGigabit Ethernet (Broadcom)
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition
Test-Setup (Machine 2 is not in this picture…)
the drives and behind the fans…LOUD!
a hot-swap fan and SATA cable close-up shot…
Machine 2:
Pentium 4 (Prescott) 3 Ghz
2 Gigabyte of RAM
2xPromise(!) FastTrack S150 TX4 SATA
7×250 Gigabyte (Western Digital)
1xGigabit Ethernet (Intel)
Linux 2.6.something
Machine 2 on top of Machine 1…
Machine 1 is destined to be the Documentation-Server running a Sharepoint Portal Server 2003. But we’ll do some testing with String Bean WinTarget 2.0 iSCSI Target Software. On Machine 2 the iSCSI Enterprise Target will provide access via iSCSI.
Our testing would be this: We setup a RAID5 on each machine and export this 500 Gigabyte Volume as an iSCSI Target Volume. We then benchmark this volume. After that we do this again with a RAID0 across the 3 drives. (so 750 Gigabyte Volume).
At the moment we only test with Windows on the client-side. We’re using h2benchw for this purpose.
Stay tuned for the results. Oh I almost forgot: The Promise VTrak m500i successfully synched a 1 Terabyte iSCSI Volume and I was able to mount and format this volume. The first test showed that about 66 Megabyte/s are possible on this RAID5 volume. The benchmark is running since about 2 hours – would take 6 more hours to complete. Of course we’ll also will test a stripe on the VTrak m500i.
Source 1: FastTrack S150 TX4 SATA
Source 2: String Bean WinTarget
Source 3: iSCSI Enterprise Target
Source 4: h2benchw