Fujitsu Siemens FibreCAT SX88

We then created another dual-drive striped vdisk with a single volume. We assigned this to a second Boston dual 3GHz Xeon 5160 server, which we direct-attached to the second FC port on the array's RAID controller.

With Iometer running on both servers, we saw a raw throughput of 510MB/sec, showing there was some contention for resources on the single RAID controller. We also tested MPIO operations.

Although the CLI is a bit basic, we set up dual FC connections from one server with a weighted policy applied. We started Iometer up across both test volumes and saw a throughput of 480MB/sec.

We pulled one of the FC connections and watched speed drop to 368MB/sec, but the connection to both volumes wasn't lost. We plugged the FC cable back in and transfer rates climbed back up again.

One of our biggest issues with FC SANs is the high price certain vendors charge, which has pushed fibre channel out of the reach of SMBs on strict budgets, but Fujitsu Siemens has sensibly priced the SX88. Performance under load could be better, but expansion potential and features are very good.

Author: Dave Mitchell