On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 7:43 PM, u235sentinel <u235sentinel@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 06/07/2010 12:13 PM, Vick Khera wrote:
>>
>> Ditto. Of late I'm buying HPs, but I haven't yet put one into
>> database service. Our DB servers are all currently Sun with fibre
>> channel cards to external RAID systems.
>>
>>
>
> What kind of external RAID systems do you connect your Sun servers to? I've
> talked to Oracle/Sun and haven't been able to get a solution even similar to
> the 4540 systems. I'm hoping to find something that will allow a couple
> disk controllers to a subsystem. Even one would be an improvement. That
> way if I have to I can setup a ZFS pool in whatever RAID config I want
> across multiple controllers and disks. I'm figuring a 2TB database will
> choke if I only have one controller handling more than a dozen or so disks.
Where I work we use these:
http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sata_enclosures/scsas16rm.asp
for when we need lots of throughput (file servers). They allow four
SAS connectors instead of the typical one or two.
and will be using these:
http://www.aberdeeninc.com/abcatg/kitjbod-1003.htm
for our database servers, where IOPS is far more important than seq speed.
My experience has been that the number of RAID controllers is no where
near as important as the speed of said RAID controllers. I'd rather
have a very fast RAID controller handling 16 disks at once, than 4
mediocre ones handling 4 disks each. The optimal is to have two RAID
controllers, so you have redundancy. Most decent RAID controllers can
run RAID-1 across the two and then RAID-0 over those RAID-1 pairs
(either software or hardware, depending on OS and hardware
performance).
>
> Dell's solution doesn't sound right to me. We've looked at HP. They are
> more expensive with similar hardware to what Dell is offering.