2007's Highest Bandwidth Server

We live in a world of constant change. This is especially true in technology. Today's post will discuss what I believe to be the highest external bandwidth results ever recorded from a commodity x86-64 server platform. However, with the rapid change of technology, it is safe to say that these results will quickly become dated by newer technologies.

Early in 2007, my company, Third I/O, was fortunate enough to participate in a collaborative benchmark with Emulex and AMD. The goal of our benchmark was to establish the highest realistic external throughput of Fibre Channel from a single server system.

After much research, we decided to run our experiments on an HP DL585G2 as it allowed for an extraordinary number of add-in PCI Express peripherals. In addition, the block level diagram for this board showed that it was capable of some pretty amazing performance.

Long story short, our experiments resulted in 7,964 MB/s of full duplex throughput. This means that data was simultaneously being transferred in and out of the system at this extraordinary data rate.

If you'd like further details, check out the performance brief at:

http://www.emulex.com/white/hba/tio-perfbrief.pdf

In closing, I feel it is only fair to state that this same level of performance would likely be seen on other similarily architected AMD systems. However, based on our research and system availability, the HP DL585G2 was the system chosen and it truly did deliver some amazing results.

What lies ahead in 2008? I believe that this will be an amazing year for high bandwidth systems. Intel has many tricks up their sleeve, including integrated memory controllers in their new processors, but AMD is working on several new high bandwidth architectures as well. In the end, this is very good news for us as consumers.