Summary: Looking for a Sun Server

From: Joe Joseph (sectra95@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Apr 14 1998 - 22:47:00 CDT


Question :

Hello Gurus,

I am looking for a Sun Server which can replace one of my other unix
box. This new server will have an Oracle Financials System.
About 1000 records will be updated every day, on certain days the number
of records updated may go upto 2000 and will have about 10-15 active
users everyday.

I am also looking for RAID storage for the same system and would like to
have hot spares/hot swaps etc. About 10-15% of data growth anticipated
every year and at present about 15G of hard disk is used up. The new
system is planned to run for a period atleast 5 years.

I would like to get your inputs on this.
I will summarize

TIA
Joe
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Answers
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Tom Mornini <tmornini@infomania.com>

Ultra Enterprise 1 or 150 low end.
Ultra Enterprise 2 or 450 comfortable.
Ultra Enterprise 3xxx we have more money than we need.
 
Sun has some nice systems, but http://www.baydel.com is my favorite.
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Eugene Kramer <eugene@uniteq.com>

I've never ran Oracle Financials, but it sounds like a work for not
morethan Ultra 2300 with a couple of disk multipacs (twp are needed not
for storage, for reliability). Oracle likes a lot of memory. So you want
512M+.

Interesting what other people running Oracle Financials say. Will wait
for a summary.

Eugene.
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"Kevin P. Inscoe" <kinscoe@cbis.com>

Running similiar system here using Oracle. I recommend Sun Enterprise
4000 with a RSM-2000 storage array (now they are called A3000 I
*think*).

And use Veritas Volume Manager for managing the array. It is hot
swappable (for the tray) and does RAID 0,1 0+1 or 5 just dandy.

Much kudos for this combination. You must run Solaris 2.51 HW 8/97 with
some recommended patches minimum.

If you have the money buy two disk boards and mirror them using SDS
or Veritas.

BTW: You get a license of Veritas Volume Manager when you purchase Sun
storage arrays. But the diskbds will cost you a license or you can
use SDS which is bundled with Solaris 2.6.

E4000 Prom needs a Y2K upgrade for older ones.
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"Chris Liljenstolpe - Network Engineer" <cds@mcmurdo.gov>

     The load sounds pretty light on record announcments. As far as the
users, will they actually be logged into the server, or doing queries
from some other platform? That answer would affect the sizing. Also,
what are you looking to spend, in a big ballpark range....

     You probably want to look at a 3000 or 4000 with a Sun A5000 Disk
array if you have the $$. The user platform issue impacts how much
memory and how many processors you load onto the machine. For less
cash, you could probably get buy with a 150 server and a BoxHill 5300
raid array, but the scalability won't be as great.

     Chris

________________________________________________________________

Rahul Roy <uroy@eadev1.vanguard.com>

An E3000 with maybe 4 CPU's and 1 Gb of RAM should do it for you ......
Also - you could attach a Series 100 SSA and use VxFS ....of course a
lot would depend on your budget !!!!

regards

Rahul

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Seth Rothenberg <SROTHENB@montefiore.org>

Joe,
We have an SSA-112. We use Solstice Disk Suite.
We are looking to change things, so I thought
I would share what we are looking at....

We may switch to Volume Manager because it has
easier management tools. It supports all
the disks we are considering.

We now mirror within the SSA-112. That's not
too easy or safe, because there are 3 trays
which makes hot-swapping impossible and warm
swapping hard also. If we had a second array,
we could have nearly-hot swapping, because
the disks (up to 10) in each tray would be
mirrored to the other array. Also, that would
be complete redundancy, including even the power
cord and circuit breaker.

Another thought is the A5000. It seems very
reliable, everything duplicated EXCEPT the
power cord and the backplane. I am against this
solution as a single solution.

The third (astronomical) possibility is to get
two small A5000. For us, this would be slightly
overkill, but it would be maximum redundancy.

The nice thing about A5000 is that we can have
more than 2 hosts, which is not easy with SSA.
(We have High Availability software.
Will you be using HA software?).

As for CPU, I will let others advise you.
Our volumes are about 100 times that,
and we use a SC1000E. It sounds like a low-end
Ultra Workstation will serve your needs.

Look for a CPU with a fibre port in it that
matches the array you are buying. The A5000
(FC/AL) is NOT compatible in either direction
with the SSA112 (25MB FC).

Seth
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sandeep@airmail.hobl.lucent.com

Joe,

It depends what kind of money you ( your company) is planning to spend.

You may go for an Ultra 2 ( 2CPU), with say 256MB RAM and if you are
only talking of 15-25 GB, you can go in for Sun Multipack. It can hold 6
x 9 GB drives. and put Solstice Disk Suite. This can be a cheaper
solution.

Or you can go in for E3000 or E4000 and go for Network Array, but this
will be costly affair.

But I think, as you said it will have 10-15 active users, and 15 GB
disk, Ultra 2300 should be good enough for you.

Sandeep
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