SUMMARY: Disk Storage Array

From: Thang Victor Dinh (tdinh@mail.irvine-sensors.com)
Date: Tue Mar 05 1996 - 13:37:08 CST


Hello Managers

Sorry for the delay with this summary. Just been busy lately

Original Post:

Hello Managers

I am planning to increase our storage space by buying more harddrives.
My workstation network is small enough so that I can easily add new
harddrives localy to each station. But , at the same time, I'm also
looking at the disk storage array option. What are the disadvantages and
advantages of the two ? What considerations should I look into before
deciding. Any advice would be helpful. Will summary.

Responses:

1.
        The main problem in our site has been complexity and reliablity,
our sun arrays have failed many times and they are complicated to setup.
On the otherhand Baydel's hardware has been much more reliable and better
performance. Generally both things are improved if RAID is done in hardware,
software complicates things and sometime it does not work.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Mike (Mehran) Salehi mrs@cadem.mc.xerox.com (716) 422-2725
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

2.

The disadvantages are that you will have to do things over the network.
THis may not be terrible, but it will generally be slower than the
hard drive on a local machine. You should also be able to buy more
storage as disks than as an SSA.

Automounter maps to make sure everybody can see everything on those
disks could get interesting too.

Kevin.Sheehan@uniq.com.au (Kevin Sheehan {Consulting Poster Child})

3.
  This is an excerpt from another SUMMARY Herbert Wengatz
<hwe@uebemc.siemens.de> sent me.

...we have several open issues right now with sun, because we have lost
entire raid5 volumes under veritas volume manager several times now (6x
in the last year, 3x in the past week!). we have lost data

for one thing, hot sparing doesn't work correctly yet. if you have an
e-mailable pager, you might want to find the script that reports that a
disk has gone bad, and add a line to page you. several times we have
seen volume manager mark a disk bad, but fail to employ the hot spare.
of volume manager.

4.

The main reason for going to a RAID Array is for protection of your data.
RAID arrays provide fault tolerance, so if a disk goes bad you still have
your data. An array is a very convient way to organize you programs and
data. Look at your operation, if it would cost you many thousands of
dollars if you lost a critical disk drive you should get an array.

Ed Romascan <ed@magma.COM>

Thank you all:

Mike (Mehran) Salehi mrs@cadem.mc.xerox.com
Kevin.Sheehan@uniq.com.au (Kevin Sheehan {Consulting Poster Child})
Herbert Wengatz <hwe@uebemc.siemens.de>
Ed Romascan <ed@magma.COM>



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