Dell 2900 server with Perc 6/i

[danmaday]

I just bought two Dell 2900 servers with Perc 6/i raid controllers. Each raid controller has 8 146 GB 15k drives. That's about 975 MB in free space on each server. I will be putting a Laserfiche document management system on one of the servers. The other server is my domain controller. The domain controller has about 90 gb of user data. The other server has about 60 gb. I have a set of Nortel business switches. I have 35 users of which 25 are active at any one time.

My problem is that my servers are slow. In the afternoon it takes about 10+ seconds to open a mapped drive. I cannot understand why.

Dell tech support said I had too many drives in the array (huh? - they never said that when I was buying the drives) and that I should change my read to read ahead adaptive. That's is opposite from what the manual says.

Any ideas?

I thought I was buying a Maserati and I feel like I have a Ford Ranger.

Thanks

Dan Maday

[jamhough22]

Is it clogged with un-used junk???
is the hardware all set up properly???
im not verry good with servers and stuff like that... just guessing..

[BipolarBill]

A few possible solutions:

Slow Network Drives in Windows XP

File sharing on the network is slower than expected in Windows Server 2003 SP1

XP : speedup access to network shares

[danmaday]

Bill

Thanks for your excellent response.

I just received the servers in late March 2008 and I believe I am at SP2. I am running with automatic updates on and I am current.

I will look into the Webclient solution you suggested.


As to the other comment about junk on the server. Hey this is a server used by small town so photos of Fred's retirement party are on the server.

My point on the technical side is that the drives are less than 10% full and Dell is suggesting I try Raid 10. Can you believe it? This especially ticks me off because 3 tech guys from Dell reviewed my order before I submitted it.

Dan

[phishin4dmb]

The PE 2900 has Duel gig Nic with TOC, so that shouldn't be the problem, what about the switches? I am assuming they are 10/100/1000?

Also depending on the RAID setup it can adversely affect access time. Below is a great read on RAID setup with all the various comparisons and benchmarks.

Article 1) RAID Scaling Charts, Part 1 : RAID Testing With 2-8 Drives - Tom's Hardware
Article 2) RAID Scaling Charts, Part 2 : RAID Scaling Charts, Part 2: RAID 5 And RAID 6 - Tom's Hardware
Article 3) RAID Scaling Charts, Part 3: 4-128 kB Stripes Compared : RAID Scaling Charts, Part 3: Stripe Sizes At RAID 0, 5, 6 Analyzed - Tom's Hardware

If I remember correctly the Perc6 has some I/O problems in some Linux distros.

Let me know if you got this fixed, I am quite curious.

Steve

[KevinSeneca]

I set up one clone box under Vista Business 64bit Edition with 8 15k 36GB 2.5" SAS drives, all striped into a RAID-5 Array. I was getting 200MB/sec transfer rate to the OS.

Then I bought a Dell Poweredge 2900 Gen III with PERC 6/i card, 2 x XEON 2.5GHZ 12MB L2 cache each, 16GB ram and 10 x 160GB 3.5" SATA Hard drives. I set up 4 Raid 0 Mirror sets, then I striped the 4 Mirrors sets giving me a Raid 10 Data Volume (AKA RAID 1+) and I simply Mirrored 2 of the drives to use as a seperate Volume for the OS.

The Server is Running Windows Server 2008 64bit Edition, and the data transfer rate from the RAID 10 Array is over 1GB/sec - its really fast even though it is only cheap 160GB 7200 RPM SATA Drives.

I think the efficiency on the RAID 5 Array (I am guessing that is what you made) is lost in the writing of the parity - there is a lot of math overhead for the controller card having to split the data up across all of those drives......

Let me know if this helps - or let me know what type of RAID array you built - I have had a lot of experience with different storage configurations lately.