Sun Storage 5210 NAS Appliance
 
Sun Storage 5220 NAS Appliance
 
Sun Storage 5310 NAS Appliance
 
Sun Storage 5320 NAS Gateway/Cluster System
 
Sun Storage 5320 NAS Appliance
 
Sun Storage 5310 NAS Gateway System
 

GCS>Sun Microsystems>Storage - Disk>Network Attached Storage
 

To access the CLI on OS version 4.21 or later, simply open a telnet or ssh connection to the NAS and enter the administrator password. For version 4.20 and earlier, first enter admin in response to the "[menu]" prompt.

NOTE: Running these CLI commands can impact the performance of the array. Ensure that the customer is aware of this before attempting to run these commands.

Aratewrite

The aratewrite command is used to create a file, and will return performance data after the write operation is complete. The syntax for this command is as follows:

 aratewrite /volume/directorypath/filename size blocksize

Volume and directorypath make up the full path to the destination file. The specified filename will be created in the specified location. The size is the size of the file to be created in kilobytes. So a file of size 1000000 would be 1 gigabyte is size. Before running this, the customer should verify that sufficient free space exists to create the file. A blocksize of 32768 should be used for performance testing, though this parameter can be varied. The default block size is 8K.

The following example shows the syntax for an aratewrite creation of approximately a 10G file:

 NAS > aratewrite /vol1/test.file 10000000 32768
Writing 9765MB in 32KB blocksize with 0MB per commit.
10240000000 bytes (9.536G) in 188.415 seconds  51.83MB/sec

This was taken from a completely idle ST5320. Performance can vary widely based on the model, storage configuration and what the server is doing at the time.

Be sure to delete any files created with aratewrite when finished testing. A console del command is available for this purpose.

Rateread

The command rateread is used to read a file and will give performance at the end of the file read operation. It uses the following syntax:

 rateread /volume/directorypath/filename blocksize

As above Volume and directorypath make up the full path to the destination file, and filename is the name of the actual file to be read. Once again the 32768 blocksize should be used. It is very important to use actual data files and NOT the files created by aratewrite or ratewrite for this purpose. These file contain repeating simple patterns and will return artificially high results, due to caching.

Here is an example of rateread output from the same 5320:

 rateread /vol2/bigfile.cap 32768
10737418240 bytes (10G) in 64.960 seconds  157.6MB/sec

Evaluating Results

It is very important to note that these commands are intended as a sanity check for the backend performance, and to isolate performance problems. Actual benchmarking should involve multiple clients moving continuous streams of data to and from the NAS over the network.

When measuring performance with these utilities, compare the network performance to the ratewrite results for clues where to look for a problem. For example, if you are copying a file from the NAS at 500KB/s and rateread shows 60M/s that would be an indication to look elsewhere. However, if rateread returned a similar result, you could look into disk related solutions such as cache or non-optimal LUN status.

Below are some examples of the different commands run on a 5310 and a 5210. Also included are examples of commands run on a 5210 that has a cache battery problem, showing how the write performance is impacted. All 3 of these arrays were idle as far as front end activity so these numbers reflect that.

Example of commands run on a 5310:

 SE5310 > aratewrite /PTStestvol01/testfile1gb 1000000
Writing 976MB in 8KB blocksize with 0MB per commit.
1024000000 bytes (976.5M) in 36.619 seconds  26.66MB/sec

 SE5310 > aratewrite /PTStestvol02/testfile1gb 1000000
Writing 976MB in 8KB blocksize with 0MB per commit.
1024000000 bytes (976.5M) in 35.779 seconds  27.29MB/sec

 SE5310 > aratewrite /PTStestvol03/testfile1gb 1000000
Writing 976MB in 8KB blocksize with 0MB per commit.
1024000000 bytes (976.5M) in 37.470 seconds  26.06MB/sec

Example of commands run on a normal 5210:

 se5210-146g-a > aratewrite /vol01A/testfile1gb 1000000
Writing 976MB in 8KB blocksize with 0MB per commit.
1024000000 bytes (976.5M) in 11.153 seconds  87.55MB/sec

Example of commands run on a 5210 with a cache battery problem:

 v-se5210a > aratewrite /vol01A/testfile1gb 1000000
Writing 976MB in 8KB blocksize with 0MB per commit.
1024000000 bytes (976.5M) in 341.185 seconds  2.861MB/sec

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