Dell MD3200/MD1200 6Gb/sec Shared SAS performance tests

We recently acquired a Dell MD3200 and MD1200 6Gb/sec shared SAS storage system and I have spent a couple of days setting up some tests to see how it compares to our old iSCSI EMC Clariion.  Wasn't really a fair fight, given that the EMC had 500GB 7200rpm SATA disks in it, whereas the new systems had 450GB 15000rpm SAS in the MD3200 and 2TB 7200rpm nearline SAS in the MD1200.

Big caveat on the following test results ... all are the result of testing a single VM ... I do not (yet) have any results with a multipleVM shared workloads on shared LUNs, so I haven't tested the impact of contention, locking, etc.

Tests were done by running simple IOMETER jobs.  Results per job were cross-checked with 'esxtop' to ensure that they roughly matched (they did).  I installed a Windows Server 2008 R2 VM and created 100GB vmdk's on each storage tier.  I tested with 5-disk and 6-disk RAID5 as well as a few tests with a 6-disk RAID10. 

I had a guess at constructing some sample workloads to simulate SQL data (reading/writing 64KB chunks of data) as well as simulating retrieval of data for backups.  My guess as to how these might work could be way off!  If anyone thinks so and can suggest improvements to the IOMETER test workloads, I am happy to receive that feedback and can probably repeat the tests with different parameters.

Some of the conclusions I reached (some of which came as a surprise to me, and some which didn't!):

• 5-disk RAID5 is almost indistinguishable from 6-disk RAID (between 2% and 4% better performance with the 6-disk config)

    edit: this is only under light workload ... see updated stats below

• 5-disk RAID5 out-performed a 6-disk RAID10 by a fair margin (about 20%) on the "all in one" IOMETER tests

    edit: this is only under light workload ... see updated stats below

• 450GB 15k SAS outperformed 2TB 7.2k nearline SAS by 50%-100% in a 5-disk RAID5 configuration

• its possible to pull around 700-800MB/sec of real data out of the shared SAS storage given optimal conditions, which blows away a small iSCSI config (unless you have masses of 1Gb/sec NICs teamed, or are blessed with 10Gb/sec ethernet)

Here's the some of the test results, in case they're of interest.  Feedback welcomed.