Re: 280R and A5200 question

From: Rich Pierson (no_at_no.net)
Date: 06/30/04 

Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2004 08:17:18 -0500

Juhan Leemet <juhan@logicognosis.com> wrote in
news:pan.2004.06.30.05.29.08.316968@logicognosis.com:

> On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 21:20:53 -0400, Dennis Clarke wrote:
>> On Tue, 29 Jun 2004, Rich Pierson wrote:
>>> I just finished racking and installing a new to me 280R Sunfire and
>>> an a 5200 with 12 discs, Solaris9 from the dvd. Six in front and 6
>>> in back.
>
> You don't say what the purpose of this storage is, i.e. access stats.
>
>> Good config. That should work well. I guess that you are not using
>> an additional controller or fibre HBA ?
>>
>>> Format sees them fine plus the two internal hard drives on the
>>> sunfire. Everything is up and running.
>>> I want to make 2 raid arrays
>>
>> You seem to want RAID for some reason. My only advice is "don't do
>> that." The A5200 does not provide a hardware RAID controller...
>> For now I simply suggest that you do not perform a RAID setup. The
>> performance is terrible. Go with a stripe with reasonable stripe
>> depth.
>
> While I would generally agree with this advice, I think the design
> tradeoff(s) should take into account the usage.
>
> While it is true that in my case I measured a 5x disk I/O overhead
> with Solaris9 SVM S/W RAID on a 711 array I setup for my own use, I'm
> still happy to use it that way. My usage is: seldom write,
> occasionally read, in a code repository for reference purposes. S/W
> RAID5 works fine for me: max storage efficiency and reasonable (for
> me) performance, with drive failure protection (5 drives on-line and 1
> hotspare). Depends on the situation.
>
> The fibre array should perform better than my old SCSI-W 711 on
> Ultra2.
>
> I would say: if you can stand writing to your disk array at 1/5th the
> normal write throughput, S/W RAID5 might still be a viable
> alternative, otherwise don't consider it, and go with mirroring
> instead. Note that reading from S/W RAID5 is pretty good, since it is
> (sort of) striped.
>
> Although... as you imply... H/W RAID controller with lots of battery
> backed cache and many internal SCSI channels would be ideally
> flexible. However, that is quite a different animal, with an expensive
> pedigree.
>

Actually there is going to be an iplanet portal running on this, the
array is going to be used to store scanned images that customers download
to the portal server. They, the images, can then be downloaded by various
coders around the country who will be viewing the images and moving the
information over to a spread *** locally then uploading the completed
spreadsheets back to the portal where the customer will grab them back.
Most of the coders are using either cable or DSL and two with satellite

I currently have it running on a E250 with 80GB of storage for 8
customers, I actually was going to assign each customer one drive on the
A5200, then add addtional arrays as/if needed as we get more customers.
Currently I'm not really concerned with performance as my limiting factor
is limited big time by only having a dual T1...and very little
minipulation is done inhouse other than to move the older [30 day] images
over to some spare 30 gig drives in the E250's drive bay where they
eventually get moved to a DDS4 tape every 3 months tar'd and sent to the
customer. It will be several months before I can justify moving from a
the dual t's to an OC though I do have a 3600 with an OC wic ready to go.
The other 280R is going to be running oracle and currently has 2 80gig
internal HD's while we move off of access, one for the OS and one for the
DB, eventually an addtional A5200 will be added as our local db grows but
that will be a while. I just want to get this first one running.
We bought the A5200 used and I'm wondering if they came with some kind of
management software when new and thats the piece of the puzzle I'm
missing. Still curious why the SMC 2.1 console goes off into never never
land when I try to use the extended option under storage, maybe it's
looking for some of that possibly missing software ???
I just started reading the sun doc on the a5200 I pulled down and printed
last nite so perhaps there will be some answers there...

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