Advatronix Nimbus 400 File Server Review

Performance Metrics - Storage Subsystem

In the previous section, we looked at various benchmarks for databases, web servers, general memory and CPU performance etc. For a file server, the storage performance is of paramount importance, since the main expectation from the system is one of writing to and reading from a disk volume protected against disk failure with some sort of resiliency configuration. In this section, we use Ubuntu 14.04 and mdadm to configure the disks in the hot-swap drive bays in a RAID-5 volume. Selected benchmarks from the Phoronix Test Suite are run with the RAID-5 volume as the target disk.

AIO Stress

Our first test in the storage benchmark is the AIO Stress PTS test profile. It is an asynchronous I/O benchmark, and our configuration tests random writes to a 2048MB test file using a 64KB record size, enabling apples-to-apples comparison with the other results reported to OpenBenchmarking.org. Note that the Nimbus 400 has only four disks while the ASRock C2750D4I ssystem was tested with eight drives.

FS-Mark

FS-Mark is used to evaluate the performance of a system's file-system. The benchmark involves determination of the rate of processing files in a given volume. Different test profiles are used - processing 1000 files of 1MB each, processing 5000 files of 1MB each using four threads, processing 4000 files of 1MB each spread over 32 sub-directories and finally, 1000 files of 1MB each without using sync operations to the disk. The processing efficiencies are recorded in the graphs below.

PostMark

This benchmark simulates small-file testing similar to the tasks endured by web and mail servers. This test profile performs 25,000 transactions with 500 files simultaneously with the file sizes ranging between 5 and 512 kilobytes.

Numbers from the evaluation of other systems can be found on OpenBenchmarking.org.

Both FS-Mark and PostMark seem to be CPU-bound, rather than just disk-bound, according to the above results.