Re: Beginning to think about VMware and SCO 5.0.5

On Wed, 25 Jun 2008, Steve M. Fabac, Jr. wrote:
processor might be preferable to switching over to Xeon processors
simply because of their more likely future widespread availability.
Even these lowly desktop processors will provide a 5-10x performance
improvement, especially combined with a gigabyte network switch (I
assume users are connected with telnet or ssh?)

Telnet as all are local. I use ssh for remote administration.
The application programmer uses VPN to connect to the LAN
and then telnet to the SCO Box(s).

A newer RAID supporting SCO and switching over to RAID10 using
smaller, faster 15K drives will provide an additional boost, along
with a Quantum DDS5 tape

By smaller, are you referring to 2.5" drives?

Raid-10 is total overkill for this application. The systems
are running with RAID1 on two 36G drives with 14G remaining
un-assigned drive space.

Besides, I am now gun shy of SCSI RAID: On 6/12 I was called at 19:50
when they had been down for 4 hours after losing building power. They
tell me that the servers had all been shutdown before the UPS batteries
ran down. On 6/14, I put two new Fujitsu 10K drives in the primary
system as RAID1, The backup system was still running on the old Seagate
10K drive.

On 6/19, I added three new Seagate 15K 146G disks to the mix by removing
Fujitsu disk ID0 from the primary system and installing one of the 15K
disks and allowed the controller rebuild from the 36G disk at ID1. I
installed a 15K disk in the backup system at ID1, shutdown and created a
RAID1 out of the 36G 10K Seagate at ID0 and the new 15K disk at ID1.
Both RAID's completed the rebuild and went "optimal."

During the night of 6/19 they lost power again after the night shift had
left. The UPS(s) battery ran down. The next morning, None of the disks
would come up. All showed "no media" for the block size in the RAID
controller setup screen. All drives connected to the Adaptec 29160
controller POST'ed as "Failed Start Unit Request."

So, in two weeks we lost four of the original six 10k 36G Seagate
drives, Two new Fujitsu 10K 36G drives, the remaining two original 10K
36 Seagate drives, and three new 15K 146G Seagate drives. All these
drives report "Failed Start Unit Request."

I have lost 8 drives all at once. All drivers were purchased at the same
time. I now like to stagger my drive purchases. I like to have my
drivers purchased 1-2 years a part. This has resolved my all drive
failures at the same time. I have often seen multiple drive failures on
drives purchased at the same time. Drives just all seem to drop dead at
the same time for me when purchased at the same time, but staggering the
purchases has really assisted in prevent failures at the same time. I
like doing 2 at a time. (knock on wood) I do not want to jinx anything.
But doing this has then seen only the 2 drives dying at the same time.
The old bell curve on failures seems to show that drives fail at about the
same time, when in use.

6/20 I got the customer up and running on two borrowed Fujitsu
36G 10K drives, one in each server on the RAID controller but not
in a RAID.

....

How the hell can all the disks in two servers go bad in less then
two weeks? So I'm a little shell shocked and gun shy concerning
RAID10 at this time.

All purchased/manufactured at the same time and running at about the same
length. The bell curve predicts failures at the same time. So I am
really a believer in drives dying at the same time. Hence staggering when
pruchased/manufactured. Mine have seen the drives from the same
manufacturing run. I have at most 8 drives dye with-in 2 weeks. Research
showed they all were from the same manufacturing run. So yeah they dye at
the same time.

Good Luck,

--
Boyd Gerber <gerberb@xxxxxxxxx>
ZENEZ 1042 East Fort Union #135, Midvale Utah 84047
.

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