Disk farms

All, I was hoping to get some opinions from the list members about disk farms and how they work for Informix. I've followed the arguments about RAID5 etc, but does anyone have any opinions on disk farms. Me myself i'm a bit sceptic, i like lots of disk, no striping, no raidn, just raw partitions and let Informix make the decisions, but some of the mass storage vendors claim they support Informix. Apparently Network Appliances and Emc**2 is on our short list. -- /* ----------------------------------------------------- * * Willem Roos wroos@shoprite.co.za * * roosj@mweb.co.za * * 0(+27)21 980 4941 * * 0(+27)21 919 0198 * * ----------------------------------------------------- */

Willem Roos wrote: > > All, > > I was hoping to get some opinions from the list members about disk farms > and how they work for Informix. I've followed the arguments about RAID5 > etc, but does anyone have any opinions on disk farms. Me myself i'm a > bit sceptic, i like lots of disk, no striping, no raidn, just raw > partitions and let Informix make the decisions, but some of the mass > storage vendors claim they support Informix. Go with a large disk farm with RAID 10 - striped mirrored pairs, with multiple cached controllers. Make stripe size 8K or 16K and stripe 10 -> 30 drives together then partition the stripe into 2GB chunks for Informix and never again worry about where your data lay. Also look into whether your storage manager can vary the stripe size from disk zone to disk zone. Many SMs can and ALL SCSI drives use multiple zones with differing numbers of sectors from zone to zone. This simple optimization can improve throughput be 15-20%. You just need to use drives from a manufacturer who is willing to tell you the zoning pattern of the drive (Seagate will not for example) so you can teach the storage manager which tracks are in which zones and how many sectors are in each. Art S. Kagel "RAID 5 should never be used for relational database disks." - Art S. Kagel, 1998