IDS Forum

Re: Informix on a SAN?

Posted By: rroussey@comcast.net
Date: Wednesday, 11 March 2009, at 5:20 p.m.

In Response To: RE: Informix on a SAN? (Jonathan Smaby)

My 2cents;

I was given a Clariion SAN to move a heavily-used OLTP db to, that was configured without my input. I had to take rootspace, logspace, 5 temp spaces and 7 dbspaces and make them fit into 2 large RAID 10 LUNs. It was FC connections from server to SAN. The bottleneck was that there were only the 2 channels for the 2 LUNs. The queues for the 2 LUNs were constantly backed up from all the I/O. My advice; keep as many smaller LUNs as reasonable, so you have as many I/O paths as possible. You want to make use of that multi-threaded architecture.

Bob

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Smaby" <Jonathan.Smaby@pomona.edu>
To: ids@iiug.org
Sent: Wednesday, March 11, 2009 12:32:26 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: RE: Informix on a SAN? [15092]

Good morning Joseph,

Gladly, I have two different uses of Informix IDS 10.00.FC5 in two
different SAN environments. My primary use of Informix with my
University's ERP system by Jenzabar. It's on an HPUX system with an EMC
Clariion cx700 Fibre-channel SAN. I use LVM manager with logical
volumes and asynchronous kernel writes to raw volume space (uncooked
file system). The 2nd deployment of Informix is on a RedHat EL 4.7
Intel EMT/64 system (IBM xSever x3550 machine) with a Left-Hand Networks
iSCSI SAN. The Left-Hand iSCSI SAN (Raid 10 LUNs) works very well. I
was initially skeptical of IP based SAN, because all the performance is
usually in hardware and not in software, like fibre-channel, but
fibre-channel is $$$ expensive. I was very impressed and surprised by
the iSCSI performance of Informix IDS 10.00 on RedHat using LVM managed
logical volumes and using the raw disk block device files (i.e.
/dev/vgdb/rlovl-root.1, /dev/vgdb/rlvol-dbspace.1, etc., etc.).

Bang-for-the-buck, Left-Hand Networks iSCSI SAN performs as well as or
better than my fiber-channel SAN for a lot less maintenance and uses
commodity hardware.

For my Left-Hand iSCSI storage node Intel EMT/64 system, I'm using HP's
DL185S SAS Server:

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/dl185g5_ss/index.html

And my RedHat w/ Informix 10.00 servers are running on IBM x3550
servers:

http://www-304.ibm.com/shop/americas/content/home/store_IBMPublicUSA/en_
US/evp/x3550.html

I hope you find this information helpful.

Jonathan B. Smaby
Pomona College
Administrative Information Systems Office
on-campus extension: x18506
phone: (909) 621-8506
email: jonathan.smaby@pomona.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: ids-bounces@iiug.org [mailto:ids-bounces@iiug.org] On Behalf Of
Joseph_Jurcazak@aotx.uscourts.gov
Sent: Wednesday, March 11, 2009 8:11 AM
To: ids@iiug.org
Subject: Informix on a SAN? [15087]

Hello all,

We are about to migrate to Informix 11.50 on RHEL5 and are going to put
our data chunks on RAID 1+0 drives. However, this morning I learned that

it has been proposed that we put these chunks on a SAN instead of the
originally proposed server. We are primarily an OLTP shop with some
reports getting sprinkled in. Also, we used cooked files instead of raw
partitions for our data chunks. I thought that our type of setup on a
SAN
was an invitation for performance problems and/or corruption issues.
While
I'm waiting to get access to a SAN to run some tests, can anyone verify
this or share their experiences? I would appreciate it greatly.

Bonus question: Does SDS work on ext3 with cooked files?

Thanks,
Joe

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Messages In This Thread

• Informix on a SAN?
  Joseph_Jurcazak@aotx.uscourts.gov -- Wednesday, 11 March 2009, at 11:11 a.m.
  • Re: Informix on a SAN?
    Art Kagel -- Wednesday, 11 March 2009, at 11:33 a.m.
    • Re: Informix on a SAN?
      Joseph_Jurcazak@aotx.uscourts.gov -- Wednesday, 11 March 2009, at 12:01 p.m.
      • Re: Informix on a SAN?
        Art Kagel -- Wednesday, 11 March 2009, at 12:21 p.m.
  • RE: Informix on a SAN?
    Jonathan Smaby -- Wednesday, 11 March 2009, at 12:32 p.m.
    • Re: Informix on a SAN?
      rroussey@comcast.net -- Wednesday, 11 March 2009, at 5:20 p.m.

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