FE / BE port ratio

[rmailloux]

3PAR V400 4-node with 8 trays and 320X 300GB drives.

Is there a need to balance the number of front end ports to back end ports? I currently have 32X FE FC Host ports and 32X BE FC Drive ports. We are trying to increase the data ingest speed and want to add additional FE ports. My question is do I need to add BE connectivity as well? If not, won't I be creating a bottle neck at the BE? Do these need to be balanced?

Thanks for any help!

[Richard Siemers]

Our 3PAR sales engineer architected our systems to have a balanced number of BE and FE adapters to get the max throughput our spindle counts could provide + an extra 20% or so overhead for cache bursts etc.

The # of BE adapters should be balanced with the # of spindles. Are you certain your FE adapters are the bottleneck?