🚀 go-pugleaf

Regarding RAID usage in the area:
( talking about disk drives, not pest or civlian control tactics )

SystemPros
  As a user I've lived with 3 Compaq systempros for about 2 years now.
  They house Novell Netware 3.11 servers.  One of them has had two
  disk controller failures in two years. I don't think the drive
  arrays or even the controller is inherently unreliable. This
  one server gets stressed quite oddly.
  
  All of the servers use dataguarding mode (XORing) for reliability.  
  I've heard no complaints about disk access time (tho plenty about 
  other server problems).

HP's SCSI drive array
  As a system manager I've used an HP scsi drive array on a model 730
  for about 6 months now.  We use it exclusively for fast access
  and mucho space per $, not for any reliability, so its just striped
  (raid level 0).

  Its fast, its big, and while it ain't cheap the price per megabyte is
  substantially lower than HP's stand-alone drive.  Suprisingly, this
  cost diff only holds for HP's unix computers, for MPEix (HP's semi-
  proprietary commercial OS) hosts its reversed.

  The most notable measure is that using oracle on the drive array
  with database files (rather than raw access to stand alone drives)
  was 5-20% faster than raw device access on a non array system. 
  
  This was not a disk benchmark per se, but an entire system replacement 
  test.  The HP 730 with the drive array lets oracle go faster than raw 
  device access on an HP 855 with fiber optic link drives.  The cost is 
  a lot less also.   
  
  Undoubtably, your mileage will vary for doing database tests.

  If someones really interested I could probably dig out the iozone
  test results I ran a few months ago.  A few results seemed odd,
  like, if I recall correctly, writes were faster than reads or 
  something.

  I am a satisfied customer of Compaq and HP's drive array equipment
  and have formally made the recommendation that we get no more
  non RAID disk drives for our HP computers.


-- 
Steve Linebarger
                  Texas Metronet, Internet for the Individual.
srl@feenix.metronet.com,   73157.1323@compuserve.com,    GEnie:S.LINEBARG
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