[p4] P4 Server performance on blade servers running windows

[Patrick M. Slattery]

Using DAS with a blade is a bad idea in my opinion for many reasons.
1) DAS in general is an outdated technology. It has very little going  
for it compared to SAN other than low price.
2) Typical internal DAS attach units for blade servers have only 4 to  
6 x 2.5" drives. You won't get much in the way of performance from  
that. I haven't seen an external DAS attach units for blades but I'm  
sure some vendors have them.
3) Blade enclosures are somewhat pricey, using up some of that  
valuable space for internal DAS drives seems a waste in my opinion.

I'd suggest still using a blade server with plenty of CPU an RAM but  
attaching it (via FCP or iSCSI) to a SAN with plenty of spindles, no  
local disk can compare to the speed of a good SAN and the SAN's built- 
in snapshots and disaster recovery features are difficult to replicate  
on local disk.
Personally I use and recommend NetApp filers and I know a lot of  
larger Perforce customers use them (See http://www.perforce.com/perforce/conferences/us/2007/presentations/DBloch_Life_on_the_Edge2007_paper.pdf 
  for one)
One nice thing that the NetApp can do is to virtually instantly backup  
your depot and then clone it so it can be check-pointed offline. My  
typical downtime for backups is 10 seconds. You can also use a clone  
to provide a simulation environment that is identical to your  
production environment. I attach the LUN clones to an ESX VM for the  
sim environment.

If you have a blade server with a PCI-E slot then you might want to  
look at the new ioDrive @ http://www.fusionio.com. It's a flash based  
DAS (Currently Linux only) but can perform as fast as most high end  
SANs. It sounds like an ideal disk for metadata volumes. I have one on  
order so I'll let you know how it works out...

On Aug 13, 2008, at 5:50 PM, Brad Holt wrote:

> Has anyone heard anything in particular on this good or bad?  This  
> would be a pretty large database (upwards of 200GB in metadata,  
> approaching 1000 users).  Last time I spoke with them, p4 support  
> didn't have much to go on.  This is all assuming that storage would  
> be DAS (no SAN storage).
>
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