Compaq 307560-001 Novell GroupWise Performance Management on Compaq Servers - Page 20

ECG007.0897 WHITE PAPER (cont.) 2...0 In order to avoid I/O contention, the following Server Configuration of ProLiant 5000 is recommended. Table 4. Server Configuration of ProLiant 5000 One network controller and one array controller Device Bus Slot 10/100 TX PCI UTP Secondary 2 SMART-2/P Array Primary 5 One network controller and two array controllers Device Bus Slot 10/100 TX PCI UTP Secondary 2 SMART-2/P Array Primary 5 SMART-2/P Array Secondary 3 Two network controllers and one array controller Device Bus Slot 10/100 TX PCI UTP Secondary 2 SMART-2/P Array Primary 5 10/100 TX PCI UTP Primary 6 Two network controllers and two array controllers Device 10/100 TX PCI UTP SMART-2/P Array 10/100 TX PCI UTP SMART-2/P Array Bus Slot Secondary 2 Primary 5 Primary 6 Secondary 3 Hard Disk Controller Tuning Some of these features offer performance and fault tolerance advantages, which were discussed in an earlier section detailing hardware versus software striping, and the number of drives supported in an array. Now the performance impact of the Smart-2 Controller Array Accelerator will be examined. The Smart-2 Controller Array Accelerator serves as a read-ahead and write cache that dramatically improves the performance of read and write commands. The Array Accelerator performance gains are best seen in database and fault-tolerant configurations. The Smart-2 Controller writes data to 4 MB of cache memory on the Array Accelerator rather than directly to the drives, allowing the system to access this cache more than 100 times faster than accessing the disk. The data in the Array Accelerator is written later to the drive array by the Smart-2 Controller when the controller is otherwise idle.