IBM Blade HS20 - Really Poor Performances

[Nathael]

Hi Guys,

Does somebody ever heard about performances issues on HS20 model 8832-M1X ?

I've benched them for days now and i'm really surprised to see that they are giving really poor RAID performances.


I've tested them on :

Debian Sarge
Red Hat ES

Windows 2003 Standard
Windows 2000 server

with various Driver, BIOS, Firmware.

I've done hardcore driver tuning in order to try to overpass LSI's embedded RAID chip.

Tested them with one CPU /Two CPU, 2,8 Ghz, 3,06 Ghz
From 512 Mb memory to 4 Gb memory etc.


IBM's technical inspector just spend hours on it yesterday and found nothing wrong but he was astonished by the low performances seen, but said also that he'd never benched Blade HS20.

One of my customer also complained about bad performance on two of his HS20


Results are that with every Benchmark Softwares, Disk Benchmarks i've tried, a Dell Workstation with IDE outperforms an HS 20 with two 3,06 Ghz CPU and 4 Gb Memory and hardware RAID1 on U320 36,4 Gb HDD


I'm waiting IBM's answer, does somebody ever experienced such troubles ?

 

[Mammoth]

What aspect is performing poor? Drive access or processor speed? If we could narrow it down then we might be able to pinpoint where to check. Also I assume you are using the SCSI expansion module correct. I had to ask!! You could check to see if caching is disabled in BIOS or you could check to see what method you are using (write-back or write-through). It could be caused by many things. Are you getting any errors reported by the Management Module?

 

[Mammoth]

Also, one other thing... What do you mean when you say that you've "done hardcore driver tuning in order to try to overpass LSI's embedded RAID chip"?