Re: Informix 7.x and RAID 5

pgreene@jax.jaxnet.com (pgreene) wrote: >We are setting up a data warehouse using Infomix 7.1 on a RS 6000 J30. We have >received conflicting information about using RAID5 storage systems in this environment. >Our database will start at around 30 GB growing to several hundred GB in the future. >Some information that we have says absolutely do not use any RAID system with Informix >7.x and other information says that it is not a problem. If you have experience with this or >knowledge about this I would greatly appreciate your help. Thanks in advance. My opinion:FWIW. I take it that since you are setting up a data warehouse this means that you will be doing a lot of DSS querying on the database? If so then it would seem to make sense to configure to Raid zero then use internal Informix Mirroring for redundancy of data. This gives you the ability to configure your Informix system for parrallel/multithreaded query on both the primary partition and the mirror partition with the same security as raid 5. I base this latter comment on the advice given me that on our SunStorage disk array losing two disks out of the stripe will cause it to spit the dummy anyway. From what I have read it is not so much that raid is a problem with 7.x. It is simply that it while it gives security of data, it gives no performance gain, unlike mirroring which gives both, at a somewhat greater cost in disk, but not as much as you would expect. Also - Can raid 5 work happily across raw partitions? Not a question I can answer, maybe someone else would like to pick up the thread. HTH Peter Tashkoff Auckland, New Zealand e-mail ptash@iconz.co.nz