RE: Informix on IBM SAN?

Hi Doug, I basically had the same issue a couple of months back. And if I had my way I would have stuck with using good'all raw devices. There is definitely overhead whenever you use SAN or for some vendors NAS (network attached storage). Primary of which is network traffice. You would want to have as fast a dedicated connection from the database server to the SAN. Then you will encounter issues with the RAID the SAN is using. This is what I call "Leap of Faith", where you give your trust to the SAN and hope that it knows what it's doing in allocating data on its devices. You would do some tinkering with the configuration of the SAN so that it can perform as much as it can. STorage vendors say that there disks are fast. But there is always overhead. You might want to do some tests and determine exactly how fast is fast. Good luck !!! Don -----Original Message----- From: d_weber@telocity.com [mailto:d_weber@telocity.com] Sent: Monday, October 02, 2000 11:35 PM To: informix-list@iiug.org Subject: Informix on IBM SAN? Hello! Does anyone have experience running Informix (or any database, for that matter) on the new IBM SAN (storage area network) equipment? My company is proposing that we move our Informix database tables to SAN, and I've got some concerns. Seeing as these new devices abstract the disks into logical volumes, and are RAID underneath, how do you deal with issues such as table fragmentation, placement on disk (i.e. inner tracks, center tracks) etc? You won't know which disk the tables are on. Or, are these new disk systems just so fast, and so sweet, that I no longer have to think (worry) about such things? That's what the hardware guys are telling me, but it sounds too good to be true. Thanks in advance. Doug