5 QLogic vs. Emulex HBA Performance Benchmarking with Oracle Workloads
WP06005 SN0032007-00
A
Dual Port Scalability with Oracle Workloads
Test Setup
The test setup consisted of the latest 4Gb HBAs from QLogic and Emulex, running on
current commercially available drivers, housed in a Dell® PowerEdge™ 6850 server
running Windows® Server™ 2003 operating system. The Dell server was connected to a
RamSan-400 with 32 GB total capacity through a QLogic® SANbox™ 5600 series 4Gbps
switch. Using a solid state disk allows you to remove the latency introduced by slower disk-
driver and future proof the performance benchmark expected from next-generation storage
arrays.
Two LUNs of 16 GB each were created on the RamSan, visible through two different ports.
The switch was zoned so that each LUN was visible through its respective port on the HBA.
Figure 2
:
Test Setup to Measure Scalability
The tests were performed using the latest hardware, software and drivers that were
commercially available at the time of testing. All tests were run using the HBA default
settings from both companies
Test Procedure
The test procedure using RamSan-400 solid state storage was as follows:
1. A QLogic 4Gb dual channel PCI Express to Fibre Channel HBA (QLE2462) was
installed on the test server using the appropriate miniport driver.
2. Two LUNS of 16GB each were created and mapped to two different ports.
3. The Windows device manager was used to verify that the LUN(s) were visible.
Each LUN was then formatted and assigned a drive letter which could be used by
the ORION tool.
4. The ORION commands were executed to simulate an OLTP workload.
QLogic SANblade
2400 series HBA
Emulex Lightpulse
11000 series HBA
Dell PE 6850 Server
QLogic SANBOX 5600 4 Gbps
FC switch
Texas Memory
System RamSan 400
