SUMMARY: Sparc Storage Solutions

From: Roy Rapoport (rsr@ide.com)
Date: Thu Sep 19 1996 - 15:37:29 CDT


My original question:
I'm working on a proposal to upgrade our two Sparc servers to
either 1000Es or Ultras. Part of the new setup will hopefully be
better disk management through use of some sort of RAID systems.
 
I've never used RAID before so I have no idea of what companies I
should be looking at. Any recommendations? What options should I
be looking at?

Thanks to the following for their responses:
jeffw@smoe.org (Jeff Wasilko)
dkashyap@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU (Dwarakanath Kashyap)
"Daniel J Blander - Sr. Systems Engineer for ACS" <Daniel.Blander@ACSacs.>
Charlie Clelland <chasc@deakin.edu.au>
Cameron Humphries <cameron@daedalus.com.au>
srl@eaga02.msd.ray.com (Steve Lucius (225-1803))
Salvatore Saieva <saieva@ppllc.com>
"Trevor Paquette" <TrevorPaquette@aec.ca>
Rahul Roy <roy@bluestone.com>
iv08480@issc02.mdc.com (Colin Melville)
"Ing. Carlos R. Guevara" <cguevara@zeus.velu.com>

Summary:
I got 7 responses recommending Sun's SSAs, especially the SSA 1xx series.

1 response recommended Digital's Storageworks RAID 410 subsystem ( RAID
level 5 ) because the SA had a high confidence level in the vendor and
their service.

EMC and Clarion were also mentioned.

Other tips, specifically about the SSAs:
>From Charlie Clelland:

---
-Our experience suggests not using RAID5 arrangements if you can avoid
it - you save disk space but incur a fairly hefty performance hit.
 
-The actual usable disk space for a nominal 2G disk is about 1.8G.   
 
-When you are configuring the RAID don't consider partitions less than
about 2G - we did because our DB apps had migrated from BSD (2G max
partition) and are not really happy with the resulting arrangement.
---

So, armed with this knowledge, and having read the DiskSuite answerbook, I convinced our management folks to buy two 25.6Gb SSA112s and will start playing with them next week.

Thanks a lot for everyone's help!!

-roy Roy S. Rapoport rsr@ide.com UNIX/Mac System Administrator http://www.ide.com Phone: 415-543-1314x280 Fax: 415-543-0145 There's something to be said for a language that lets you use &$myVar{'abc'}{$def}->[$i]->[$b](3,4);



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