QLogic 8200 Series is the Adapter of Choice for Converged Data Centers - Manual (Page 3)

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6. the testing was run for standard MtU size with multiple threads. the
NiC dual-port bi-directional scenario utilized both ports simultaneously
to measure the total throughput capabilities and the CPU efficiency of
a dual-port adapter. the failover scenario testing used bi-directional
traffic across one active port while the second port was in active
standby mode.
7. to simulate the failover, the cable was pulled from port0 on the server
during data transmission while the test script was running.
8. these steps were repeated for the emulex UCNa 10Gb PCie 2.0
adapter (OCe10100-N).
FCoe Configuration
• the iOmeter i/O test tool was used to benchmark the QLogic 8200 Series
10Gb Converged Network adapter versus the emulex UCNa. the tool
was chosen because of its ability to simulate real-world applications
and to evaluate adapter and system performance under realistic storage
workload conditions. the test accurately assesses the performance
characteristics of an adapter running on a converged network.
• iOmeter measurements were taken for the total amount of transactions
(iOPS), the total throughput (MBps) across real-world applications
(block sizes of 4 and 8KB), and the percentage of CPU required to drive
overall transactions. iOPS were then normalized by the CPU usage over
the testing period to calculate the CPU efficiency (iOPS/CPU). a higher
number indicates more efficient use of CPU resources for i/O.
• additional information regarding the test configuration (such as servers
and driver versions) can be found in appendix a at the end of this
document.
FCoe test Procedure
1. a QLogic 10Gb ethernet dual-port PCie 2.0 to Converged Network
adapter (QLe8242) was installed on the test server using the latest
released driver.
2. the adapter was then connected to a Cisco Nexus ® 5020 switch
and then to two ramSans ® configured with a total of eight LUNs.
3. the iOmeter was used to test for FCoe workload scalability. it was
configured at a queue depth of 32 with a total of 16 workers.
4. to help simulate real-world environments, test data were run
for standard storage application block sizes of 4 and 8 for
sequential read (Seq rD), sequential write (Seq Wr), and
sequential read/write (Seq Wr).
5. these steps were then repeated for the emulex UCNa 10Gb PCie
2.0 adapter (OCe10100-F).
Figure 2. FCoE Test Configuration
Test Results
the test procedures were specifically designed to test data and storage i/O
running over a converged 10Gb ethernet network. in each test case, specific
attention was given to the CPU utilization in relation to the i/O performance.
these steps were taken to create an environment in which an enterprise-
class Converged Network adapter must perform; for example, transferring
large amounts of data for an application with a high bandwidth demand
while the CPU of the servers is being highly taxed by enterprise applications
and virtual machines (VMs).
the test results demonstrate the superiority of the QLogic offload engine to
relieve CPUs of protocol processing tasks so that servers can remain highly
scalable while providing high-performance data and storage applications
the i/O bandwidth they require across virtualized networks.
ethernet test results
the test results demonstrated that the QLogic 8200 Series adapters
scaled more efficiently in an enterprise data center with real-world
application workloads compared to the emulex UCNa. For fully utilized
NiC performance testing, dual-port bi-directional testing configuration ran
traffic at full line rate across both adapter ports simultaneously. this was
true for a teaming configuration simulating a high-availability environment
with failover activated in a dual-port configuration with bi-directional traffic
running at full line-rate speeds, and through increasing workloads.
Maximum Bandwidth with Low CPU
the QLogic 8200 Series Converged Network adapter is capable of delivering
near line-rate performance from a dual-port, 10Gb adapter over a PCi
express
® Gen2 bus. this equates to more than 36Gbps (given a marginal
loss for bus latencies and encoding overhead). When compared to emulex,
QLogic’s dual-port 8200 Series adapter again gets the better of emulex
by delivering more than 36Gbps of aggregate bidirectional throughput
when sending 1500B frames and uses approximately 14 percent of the
host server’s CPU (Figure 3). the total bandwidth and CPU utilization
were captured for both companies. the results show that QLogic has the