The objective of this study was to demonstrate the sequential I/O capability of General Parallel File System (GPFS) for Linux on HS20 blades inside the IBM BladeCenter blade server with the System Storage DS4800 storage subsystem using a 4 Gbps Fibre Channel interconnect. This study shows that the GPFS file system on HS20 Blades and the DS4800 storage subsystem using eight EXP710 expansion units is capable of about 1300 MB/sec file create, and about 1600 MB/sec file read, throughput using sequential I/O.

For the purposes of this paper, “Megabyte” or “MB” is defined as 106 bytes when reporting results. This paper details the GPFS file system configuration used to achieve maximum sequential I/O for both file read and file create performance, as well as the SAN configuration. We also discuss different GPFS parameters and their effects on sequential I/O performance.