HPE Storage Users Group

Hi,

I am new to the forum, the 3Par and SAN's in general and wondered if I could get some advice on our new 3Par that we have purchased. We have a new 7200 and the performance doesn't seem to be great as we have had most of our systems running slowly. When I have looked at the PD usage Total IOPS I can see that our FC Disks our hitting around 400 IOPS at times. Is there a report that I can generate which would show the average IOPS over a period of time so see if if it's within reasonable thresholds? I have created charts to show which volumes are being hit the hardest and tried to make sure that anything that requires performance is on the FC disk and everything else is on the NL disks. Everything appears to be balanced ok over the disks as they are all being utilized to a similar degree.

Any tips or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Graham

Hi,

Do you have System Reporter installed and configured to communicate with your array?

This tool will interrogate your system at pre-defined intervals and generate just the info you are looking for.

Cheers

Do you have system reporter licensed? If so I can give you a report definition to do this (and a lot of other reports which probably should have come canned, I got them from an HP/3Par internal document). If not are you on the latest firmware? If so I believe the new console program has some reporting facilities built in but I don't have it yet to help you with that aspect. Perhaps reach out to your VAR for some help?

I'm not sure if we have the system reporter as part of the license but I am going to find out from our supplier. If it turns out that we have this then I would appreciate if you could send the report definition. I will reply once I have got a reply back from our supplier.

Unfortunately we are not on the latest firmware yet but it will be upgraded next month hopefully.

Thanks for the replies.

if your FC-drives are really hitting 400 IOPS, that would explain your performance issue.
10.000 RPM FC drives are rated for ~150-180 IOPS
15.000 RPM FC drives are rated for ~220-250 IOPS
(random, 8k, 50/50rw)

Doing more is possible but usually with a significant loss in response time.
With 400 iops i would guess it is actually doing a lot of sequential read IO, but still at 40+ msecs.

you can see 5 minute average values in the on-node system reporter (if licensed), e.g. via cli (this can then be copied and graphed in excel if need be, or directly accessed in the IMC or SSMC interface as well.
Frontend port usage of the last 24 hours (vary with the -24 to show the period you want to see): srstatport -port_type host -btsecs -24h -rw
Cache usuage of the last 24 hrs: srstatcmp -btsecs -24h
and what the drives are doing: srstatpd -disk_type FC -btsecs -24h

you are welcome to post a few lines so we can analyze what is going on as well. If you would do that, please mention the exact specification of your array as well. So:
- how many drives (of what size, type and rpm)
- how many cages
- which firmware are you running

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Hi,

Thanks for all of the assistance with this, we added some new drives and performance seems to have improved significantly. I am still trying to get hold of the system reporter software as it would be useful. I have also downloaded the 3par simulator tool which I am going to setup to get a better understanding of the 3par without the worry of breaking anything.

Thanks,

Graham