Performance and Tuning

Why We've Never Lost a Customer Benchmark

Manufacturers' published benchmarks only represent the maximum performance potential of their equipment in a sterile environment, with no interference from the operating system.

But what does a manufacturer's benchmark tell you about the performance of your application, running on your server, through your operating system? Not much.

All systems aren't the same, nor are I/O needs identical. Some applications generate heavy I/O while others need high bandwidth for pushing large amounts data to and from the storage devices. Fortunately, OSSI has proven all RAID systems are not the same either.

OSSI offers the only RAID storage systems tunable to match the I/O profile of your servers to achieve the maximum throughput for your unique situation. We've never lost a customer benchmark because we tune every RAID system we implement to match the application I/O profile.

OSSI RAID storage systems give administrators the ability to monitor performance, then adjust parameters to net the best performance. Our RAID solutions give you the control to:

  • Monitor performance from your system to storage devices
  • Determine if your RAID storage is performing optimally with applications
  • Tune your RAID storage system to match system I/O's and throughput

Determining I/O Profile

With OSSI's RAID storage systems, the user can determine the I/O profile to a specific RAID controller, logical unit, or individual disk drive. The RAID system can be configured around these profiles to get the best performance for your applications.

As well, the RAID controller continuously monitors performance since its last reset or power up. This allows performance counters on the controller to reset, issue specific I/O requests, and determine the controller performance with the current I/O load

Monitoring Performance of the RAID Array

When we also implement SYMplicity Plus software, it enables you to keep systems up and running as you make on-the-fly adjustments. The software has a number of features that let you fine-tune your configuration for maximum speed and throughput without interrupting user I/O, including:

  • Dynamic capacity expansion tools that help you add drives to an existing drive group.
  • Dynamic RAID level migration so you can change RAID level to match your environment.
  • Dynamic segment size migration to tune RAID stripe size to maximize performance.
  • Caching parameter adjustments enable tuning for maximum performance and protection.
  • Controller firmware upgrades can be performed online in dual controller environments.
  • Logical unit defragmentation let you get contiguous capacity for additional logical unit creation.
  • Performance Monitor tools help you watch and fine-tune your systems for maximum performance, monitoring I/Os, read- and cache-hit percentages, current/maximum throughput, and I/Os per second.

OSSI is committed to helping companies find the storage solution that best fits their needs. For more information contact us today!