Demartek Evaluation of HP StoreFabric SN1100E 16Gb Fibre Channel HBA and Brocade 6510 16Gb Fibre Channel Performance

3 December 2014

The computing industry is experiencing an increasing demand for storage performance and bandwidth due to increases in virtual machine density, increasing demands for application performance and continual data growth. Fibre Channel storage area networks (SANs) carry the bulk of storage traffic in the enterprise data center and are beginning to feel the stresses of these increased demands.

Enterprises may find themselves constrained by the available bandwidth between the servers and storage, or foresee a constraint as they observe their growing data consumption patterns. The HP StoreFabric SN1100E Gen 5 Fibre Channel (16GFC) host bus adapter (HBA) addresses server-side limitations on these increasing demands for storage performance by providing double the bandwidth of previous generation Fibre Channel HBAs while Gen 5 FC switching from Brocade fills the performance and bandwidth needs between server and storage.

Demartek deployed an HP ProLiant DL380 Gen8 Server with the HP StoreFabric SN1100E dual-port 16GFC HBA and connected this server via a 16GFC Brocade 6510 switch to an HP StoreServ Storage 7450 all-flash array with eight 16GFC host ports. We ran a read-intensive, data warehouse workload based on the TPC Benchmark™ standard to determine whether this type of workload could take advantage of the increased bandwidth and performance that Gen 5 Fibre Channel provides. We repeated the database workload test with a previous-generation 8Gb dual port Fibre Channel HBA, 8GFC switch, and eight 8GFC storage ports and compared the results. As a final point of analysis, we tested the same workload again, replacing portions of the 16GFC infrastructure with 8GFC optics to create a mixed speed environment.

Evaluation Series: HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 All-flash Array

Over the course of a few months, Demartek performed several Evaluations of the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450c All-flash Array. These evaluations included 8 and 16 Gb Fibre Channel technologies, database workloads and more. Click on the link to view the list of all of these evaluations.

View the Demartek Evaluation of HP StoreFabric SN1100E 16Gb Fibre Channel HBA and Brocade 6510 16Gb Fibre Channel Performance
(PDF, 721 KB)