Re: Informix OnLine on RAID drives

In article <5q10ul$q2j@cssun.mathcs.emory.edu>, hagmann@vitria.com (Robert Hagmann) wrote: > At 11:04 AM 7/9/97 -0400, Art Kagel wrote: > > > ... > > > > >Informix has a White Paper entitled RAID and Informix Database, by Ken > >Bendix in ATG which is available from their web site. Their testing > >recommends hardware mirroring over software mirroring and Informix > >Mirror (slightly) over OS software mirroring. This is a very > >conprehensive report, read it. > > > > > > With joy in my heart, I went to the Informix web page. > I can't find this white paper in the White Papers page, > and I can't find it searching for "Bendix" or "RAID". > > Is it just gone or am I just looking in the wrong place > (and where is the right place)? > > -- Bob The paper you mention is an internal one. It is also a review of ONLY Clariion with Informix. RAID systems from various manufacturers have *very different* functional and performance capabilities, even though they have the same equivalent 'notional' RAID levels, and you should avoid reading too much into this report unless you have Clariion. I have made a summary of some Informix and RAID issues (as well as how my company's RAID system approaches things) and you can get a feel for what it covers by checking the summary on http://www.baydel.com/informix.html - we can make up some complete copies available for limited distribution. Even if you are not going to consider Baydel RAID there are a couple of gems of info for other RAID users. Ken refused to let me reference his paper in mine - I can only imagine that Informix has realised that although the paper might be an excellent analysis of how Clariion performs, it has no little relevance to most of the other RAID systems. In our competitive testing of the other major RAID systems it has been always true that the RAID5 flavour is always outperformed by the RAID0+1 version (the least cost efficient). Glenn Brackenridge