What technical challenges did the team encounter in attempting the benchmark?
Well, we have found with most benchmarks not even the best planned are not without problems. During the middle of the benchmark a whole rack of servers lost power in the middle of a test during a huge snow storm in Seattle. Unfortunately they were in a non recoverable state upon attempting to power up. We ended up having to rebuild and reconfigure. One interesting note, after the loss of the blade server chassis due to power interruption the EMC Clariion was still operational and all data was intact. Also, with the high rate of traffic that we were generating on the HP Superdome (database tier) we found working with an HP engineer that we were overwhelming the single NIC card 60,000 packets/sec and had to add a total of 5 NICs on the Superdome to support the traffic from each Content Server. We also used a Intpolicy and set affinity for all NICs to specific CPUs which were local to the IO chassis in which the NIC resided. A general rule of thumb is to add an additional NIC when you rea
