Cloud Testing: Disk

I know quite a few of you are following the development of our new cloud hosting platform closely, so here are some very initial result from some brief disk testing. First up we have the standard Linux hdparm, nothing too strenuous, but it does give a quick idea as to disk performance:

/dev/sda1:
 Timing cached reads:   23004 MB in  1.99 seconds = 11575.07 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  336 MB in  3.02 seconds = 111.37 MB/sec

As you can see we’re getting 111MB/s – not bad for initial test, and something confirmed by Bonnie++ – A far more strenuous disk test:

Version 1.03e       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
karl-test3.sheff 4G 61756  79 121058  17 50688   1 51968  54 111809   0  5428   0
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                512 45927  71 315487  99  2746   2 44193  69 392805 100  2221   2

Bonnie backs up our initial numbers from hdparm, which is nice to see – and does so without using 100% CPU for either reads or writes.

These are very preliminary numbers – we’ve not even got multipath running to the SANs yet or the HA going – in theory we could get 4x those numbers with both of those items up and running. We’ve also not got all the disks running on the SAN either for those tests, in fact that’s only running off of 4 disks, in production each SAN will have 8 disks in the SAN head end plus at least 1 x 16 Bay Disk Tray as well.

We’ll have more numbers as the testing progresses, also if there is anything you’d like us to test then please do let us know.