RE:

From: SAMPATH <sampath@gulfins.com.kw> > Its not RAID. Its a cluster software as series of disks will be >in a box accessed by differenct Unix servers. Thanks. I believe the technical term is "disk farm" :-) OK, as long as it's not RAID 5, you're over hurdle no 1. Now for hurdle no2: how many servers will be attached to this disk farm? If you're going to have quite a few, and they're all doing wildly different things, then your farm needs a lot of cache and a very good caching algorithm. Effectively, each server that's attached could be using the cache in a very different way, and if you have to keep track of that manually, it could be quite a challenge. If it's a "black box" and it doesn't work, you could be in for a lot of pain. Actually, I now remember someone doing something similar (but they had over 500GB of disk and only one server), and their performance took a *massive* hit. Something to do with slow and limited channels, I can't remember the details. Perhaps you should benchmark. > > From: Obnoxio The Clown [SMTP:obnoxio@hotmail.com] > > Sent: 01 June, 2000 11:44 ' > > To: sampath@gulfins.com.kw; informix-list@iiug.org > > Subject: Re: > > > > From: SAMPATH <sampath@gulfins.com.kw> > > > > > > We're having IDS 7.3 running on Alpha 4100. All DBspaces are raw > > >partitions and mirrored. We are planning to move the disks out of > > >machine and put them as a disk array with clustering software from > > >Compaq. 5 disks + 1 emergency disk. Has anyone tried this before? If > > one > > >of the disks with dbspaces fails, will the emergency disk take over > > with > > >Informix? An early solution will be highly appreciated > > > > Sounds suspiciously like a RAID 5 solution, and I don't like RAID 5. > > RAID 5 > > does not verify the parity it writes, and I've seen a corrupted RAID 5 > > let > > go big time. It was very ugly. > > > > NO RAID 5! NO RAID 5! NO RAID 5! NO RAID 5! NO RAID 5! NO RAID 5! NO > > RAID 5! > > NO RAID 5! NO RAID 5! NO RAID 5! NO RAID 5! NO RAID 5! NO RAID 5! NO > > RAID 5! > > NO RAID 5! NO RAID 5! NO RAID 5! NO RAID 5! NO RAID 5! > > ______________________________________________________________________ > > __ > > Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at > > http://www.hotmail.com ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com