XPS or IDS customers using SANs?

Folks, if anyone is using XPS or IDS and SANs, please let me know. More information follows my signature. Thanks, Fred Hubbard IIUG -o- I need to know if there are any XPS or IDS customers using SANs. If you know of any, please reply with: who is the customer? how much data are they storing? which platform is the server on? what storage vendor is being used? has the customer had any issues? would the customer be a good success cases? Any information would be helpful even if you don't have all of what I've asked. -- Paul Taylor and Jim Troisi

Fred, Paul, and Jim, I can tell you that Verizon has moved almost exclusively to SAN storage for their internal data. They have chosen EMC as the primary vendor (there are some other solutions present, but I have not worked with any of them, and I am not certain whether Informix is being used on any of them). From an issues perspective, I believe the EMC arrays to be generally more reliable than any other non-SAN solutions that I have worked with. We have had one hardware "hiccup" that I am aware of; it was not on an Informix system, and it was not database related. Regarding success case/story, I can't state one way or another, in part because the hardware side of the business is strongly segregated from the database side, so I am not necessarily aware of all of the issue, and in part because I don't have a Verizon/non-SAN background, so I have no point of comparison. I can categorically state that we have had the most success when we have treated our SAN solutions in the same way that we would treat non-SAN disks; data placement, physical disk (spindle) separation of data, etc. are all important factors in maintaining good performance from these vendors. In general, the vendor has configured the hardware according to our requests, and then our sysadmins allocate the defined LUNS to the operating system. We had one case (non-Informix) where the disk was striped inappropriately, and caused a very measurable performance degradation in the application. In this case, the vendor configured stripe sets at the hardware level (something that we don't do at this point; mostly for flexibility) inappropriately, and our data placement (due to lack of transparency to the disk arrays) turned out to have all of our heavily hit data residing on only 4 physical disks. Once the striping issue was resolved, and we examined and corrected our data placement, we improved our application performance by a factor of more than 20%. This was not an Informix application (it was a database application; approximately 700GB allocated, 650GB used), but I believe that the exercise applies across database platforms. I would be more than happy to talk more about SAN solutions offline, should anyone need to contact me. Thanks. Dan Michaelis 813.978.6534 (office) 813.303.3225 (pager) dan.michaelis@verizon.com |---------+----------------------------> | | "FEDERICO HU...."| | | <fred@iiug.org> | | | Sent by: | | | forum.subscriber@| | | iiug.org | | | | | | | | | 02/27/2003 11:25 | | | PM | | | | |---------+----------------------------> >------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------------------------------| | | | To: ids@iiug.org | | cc: | | Subject: XPS or IDS customers using SANs? [539] | >------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------------------------------| Folks, if anyone is using XPS or IDS and SANs, please let me know. More information follows my signature. Thanks, Fred Hubbard IIUG -o- I need to know if there are any XPS or IDS customers using SANs. If you know of any, please reply with: who is the customer? how much data are they storing? which platform is the server on? what storage vendor is being used? has the customer had any issues? would the customer be a good success cases? Any information would be helpful even if you don't have all of what I've asked. -- Paul Taylor and Jim Troisi

Hi Fred, We use XPS 8.32 onbar omniback 4.1 with EMC symmetric 4680 Raid S I have great performance and no issues for 3 years. who is the customer? Lucent Technologies how much data are they storing? 350 Gig which platform is the server on? HPUX 11.0 9000 V220 & L300 what storage vendor is being used? has the customer had any issues? None would the customer be a good success cases? Yes The major issues I had were earlier releases of XPS. With latest version I tested how long XPS would stay up and it was 256 days. At that time SA had a upgrade to perform on the server which required a reboot. Thanks Carl W Berner - Team Lead Informix/Oracle DBA IBM Global Services - Serving Lucent Technologies Work : (770) 750 5225 Pager: 1-800-759-8888 Pin#1615039 Email: cberner@lucent.com -----Original Message----- From: dan.michael.... [mailto:dan.michaelis@verizon.com] Sent: Friday, February 28, 2003 8:28 AM To: ids@iiug.org Subject: Re: XPS or IDS customers using SANs? [542] Fred, Paul, and Jim, I can tell you that Verizon has moved almost exclusively to SAN storage for their internal data. They have chosen EMC as the primary vendor (there are some other solutions present, but I have not worked with any of them, and I am not certain whether Informix is being used on any of them). From an issues perspective, I believe the EMC arrays to be generally more reliable than any other non-SAN solutions that I have worked with. We have had one hardware "hiccup" that I am aware of; it was not on an Informix system, and it was not database related. Regarding success case/story, I can't state one way or another, in part because the hardware side of the business is strongly segregated from the database side, so I am not necessarily aware of all of the issue, and in part because I don't have a Verizon/non-SAN background, so I have no point of comparison. I can categorically state that we have had the most success when we have treated our SAN solutions in the same way that we would treat non-SAN disks; data placement, physical disk (spindle) separation of data, etc. are all important factors in maintaining good performance from these vendors. In general, the vendor has configured the hardware according to our requests, and then our sysadmins allocate the defined LUNS to the operating system. We had one case (non-Informix) where the disk was striped inappropriately, and caused a very measurable performance degradation in the application. In this case, the vendor configured stripe sets at the hardware level (something that we don't do at this point; mostly for flexibility) inappropriately, and our data placement (due to lack of transparency to the disk arrays) turned out to have all of our heavily hit data residing on only 4 physical disks. Once the striping issue was resolved, and we examined and corrected our data placement, we improved our application performance by a factor of more than 20%. This was not an Informix application (it was a database application; approximately 700GB allocated, 650GB used), but I believe that the exercise applies across database platforms. I would be more than happy to talk more about SAN solutions offline, should anyone need to contact me. Thanks. Dan Michaelis 813.978.6534 (office) 813.303.3225 (pager) dan.michaelis@verizon.com |---------+----------------------------> | | "FEDERICO HU...."| | | <fred@iiug.org> | | | Sent by: | | | forum.subscriber@| | | iiug.org | | | | | | | | | 02/27/2003 11:25 | | | PM | | | | |---------+----------------------------> >------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------------------------------| | | | To: ids@iiug.org | | cc: | | Subject: XPS or IDS customers using SANs? [539] | >------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------------------------------| Folks, if anyone is using XPS or IDS and SANs, please let me know. More information follows my signature. Thanks, Fred Hubbard IIUG -o- I need to know if there are any XPS or IDS customers using SANs. If you know of any, please reply with: who is the customer? how much data are they storing? which platform is the server on? what storage vendor is being used? has the customer had any issues? would the customer be a good success cases? Any information would be helpful even if you don't have all of what I've asked. -- Paul Taylor and Jim Troisi

We use IDS on HDS 7700E. Like the others, works great. No problems over last 3 years (not even a failed disk). who is the customer? FSC - Financial Service Corporation how much data are they storing? About 1/2 terabyte overall (2/3 of that is database 1/3 file storage) which platform is the server on? IBM Numa-Q 1000 (formerly Sequent) what storage vendor is being used? Hitachi has the customer had any issues? None would the customer be a good success cases? I suppose? -----Original Message----- From: FEDERICO HU.... [mailto:fred@iiug.org] Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2003 11:26 PM To: ids@iiug.org Subject: XPS or IDS customers using SANs? [539] Folks, if anyone is using XPS or IDS and SANs, please let me know. More information follows my signature. Thanks, Fred Hubbard IIUG -o- I need to know if there are any XPS or IDS customers using SANs. If you know of any, please reply with: who is the customer? how much data are they storing? which platform is the server on? what storage vendor is being used? has the customer had any issues? would the customer be a good success cases? Any information would be helpful even if you don't have all of what I've asked. -- Paul Taylor and Jim Troisi