High-End QNAP with Poor NFS Performance

[ExiaIT]

Hi,

i have a QNAP TS-EC879U-RP with 10Gb fiber connection connected to a ESX 5.1 server.

i only get 149mb/s troughput.

the Qnap has 8x 3TB WD Red disks.

the connection between the Qnap and the ESX server is a 10GB Fiber connection with certified adapters, direct connection, so no Switch between them

i went for NFS because with more than 1 iscsi host, you need a vmware license.

Can anyone explain the poor NFS performance?

[kspare]

The problem is your disks. Get some better/faster disks in there and you will see alot more speed.

I run the EC1279 with 12 WB 2TB Blacks, I can hit 500MB/s no problem.

[JarryG]

As kspare wrote: if you seek high performance, then you'd better get different drives. That "IntelliPower" means they are not even running at full speed all the time. And even that max rotational speed is only 5400rpm (that's quite low compared to 7200/10000/15000rpm drives).

One more problem I observed with similar drives in raid: those drives do not "talk" to each other, so they get quickly out of sync (one drive spinnig faster then the other). Then raid-array speed drops even more.

If you want to use cheap consumer sata-drives, use at least those designed for raid and 24/7 (i.e. RE3/RE4 if you want to stick with WD). Not this eco/green/blue crap. I'm trully surprised you got so much as ~150MB/s...

[vfk]

just add, you have 10GbE of bandwidth, and not enough speed, having a big pipe does not necessary give performance if you storage back-end is not capable of taking advantage of that bandwidth.

[ExiaIT]

When i had the setup running on iSCSI i got 560mb/s, so i think the problem is NFS!