Infiniband for the S7000 series.

The last update for the S7000 firmware started with the support of Infiniband to connect clients to the storage. Of course you expect interesting performance numbers when using this fast fabric. Cindi made some benchmarks to show the impact of using IB. As usual it’s a workload fitting in the memory cache to show the maximum performance such a system can deliver. The article reports some interesting findings especially when using NFS over RDMA over IB although the results are preliminary. The “Max NFSv3 streaming cached read” yielded a slightly better result than Brendans test with 10GBe, but with a vastly reduced CPU utilization:

I am able to reach a bit beyond Brendan's 3.06Gyte/sec with half the number of clients and reduce my CPU utilization to just 30%.

For “Max NFSv3 streaming disk write” the benchmark yielded a slightly better result than with 10GBe: slightly over 1 GBytes/s. Really neat … i’m curious about the final numbers :)