EMC AX150i vs SANmelody on PowerEdge 2900

[Atamido]

What would be the likely performance differences there would be between these two setups? This would be an iSCSI backend for two ESX servers.

Dell|EMC AX150i

Single Storage Processor

4x 500GB SATA2, 7.2K RPM

Price: $10,800 USD

PowerEdge 2900

Dual Core Xeon 5130

4GB 667MHz (4x1GB)

Windows Server 2003 R2, Standard

PERC 5/i, Integrated Controller (RAID 5)

5x 300GB SAS, 15K RPM

4x 1Gbps Cu NIC

SANmelody Option A

Price: $10,200 USD

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Here's a few threads about the AX150i. If you taken away the AX150i/ Sanmelody aspect of it, you'll get far better performance with the 15 K SAS drives over the equivalent in SATA as well as better reliability. Between these 2 the sanmelody is the way to go.

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=630096&#630096

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=658085&#658085

[Atamido]

So, you are saying that the controller and iSCSI interface between the two would be at virtually identical performance levels?

So, configuring the PowerEdge with the same 500GB SATA drives should yield a system with identical performance to the AX150i, but a $3000 cheaper price tag?

[CoreyIT]

To get half decent performance from the ax150 with the sata drives you are going to need more spindles and configure your array as raid10.

[Dave_Mishchenko · Accepted solution]

No, if you focus just on the disk themselves, with the SATA2 drives you might range between 75 and 180 IOPs per spindle. With the SAS drives you'll be running between 125 and 410 IOPS. So with the AX150i, you'd be looking at best at 720 IOPS versus 2050 with SAS drives in the Sanmelody setup.

If you concerned with disk performance, then you'd be better to go with the Sanmelody with SAS drives. As noted in the threads above, some people have experienced that the AX150i doesn't scale for performance that well.

[christianZ]

I tested SanMelody here:

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=73745

Even with older hardware you will see better results here than by AIX150.

Just my 2 cents.

[DSwarm]

Atamido,

Agree with what the other folks have stated in terms of relative comparison and IOPs stated. With this low # of drives in the config, the RPM of the drives will be a big differentiator in overall performance especially as the disk subsystem becomes saturated.

Also, depending on your application memory profile and some registry settings, you could end up using some of the 4GB RAM of the PE2900 to cache IOs; thus, further extending the performance difference by putting less pressure on your disk subsystem and fulfilling requests from much faster memory accesses. Plus, if you are benefiting from caching, you could always add more memory to improve performance from your disk subsystem.

KYang

Dell Inc.