🚀 go-pugleaf

In <145785@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> wiltzius@anduin.ocf.llnl.gov (Dave Wiltzius) writes:
| Is anyone using RAID (disks) on an SGI (or any other machine,
| actually)?
| 
| If so, I would be interested in posing a few questions such
| as what application you are using, the performance gains you
| are experiencing and the extent of your software modifications
| to achieve this performance gain.

You are very unlikely to see a performance gain over seperate
disks, unless you have a lot of file i/o that has to be to a single
partition, and get a very high performance RAID and a controller
to match.  In general RAIDs have lower performance and much higher
cost than independent disks, and the only reason for going with
a RAID is if you get one that supports hot sparing of drives and
automatic regeneration of parity, etc. afterwards.

| If you are accessing data on RAID via a network file service
| (presumably NFS), what is your network media and how much of
| a performance hit did you take going via NFS?

Even a single SCSI disk is far faster than NFS over ethernet.
FDDI is still faster than a single disk (for another year or so),
unless you have a high end IPI drive, which can be faster than even
FDDI.  Unless you are trying to set up a large fileserver for some
other reason than performance, you don't want to access RAID over
any current network (well, maybe Ultranet would do for another couple
of years).

| If any SGI folks and get me any info, I would be very interested.
| We are seriously considering using RAID on an SGI 440.  My sales
| person is in training for the next few days; still...

There are 3rd parties selling RAID for SGI, but we don't have an
officially approved SGI RAID yet, although I believe there is work
being done on RAID for the not too distant future.
--
Let no one tell me that silence gives consent,  |   Dave Olson
because whoever is silent dissents.             |   Silicon Graphics, Inc.
    Maria Isabel Barreno                        |   olson@sgi.com