Informix & Storage Area Network

Hi, I would like to have more information on Informix and SAN. We plan tyo buy a SAN solution and we want to be aware how other people do. I work with Informix 7.31FD2 How do you manage backup, mirror copy, snapshot, etc. Thanks ... And if you can refer me to any good web site ... Christian Farley

Farley, Chr.... wrote > Hi, > > I would like to have more information on Informix and SAN. We plan tyo buy > a SAN solution and we want to be aware how other people do. > > I work with Informix 7.31FD2 > > How do you manage backup, mirror copy, snapshot, etc. > > Thanks ... And if you can refer me to any good web site ... > > Christian Farley Informix works well with a SAN, but typically does not interact with it, the SAN is just another lot of disks or tapes. It is questionable as to whether it is better to stripe your data across lots of disks using the san or split the disks up to avoid contention. We do both, for big chunks of data we stripe across 3 or 4 disks, but we always try and have physically separate spindles for rootdbs, tempdbs ( up to 3 dataspaces and spindles ) and logs ( 2 dataspaces and spindles ). To use Informix's PDQ option you typically need data spread over multiple DBspaces, which gives you multithreading. You will find on this group RAID 5 is not allowed :-), and you must use RAID 10. Use Google Groups to find some excellent reasoning for this. Because Informix historically has allowed hot backups without stopping the server, the ability to break mirrors on the SAN and do a ( snapshot) backup is not so important an issue, but is widely used, but typically you will have to momentarily stop the engine to do this. My personal view is more small disks is better than few big ones. 2 10k disks can get data faster than 1 15k disk and is typically the same price. We use Compaq/DEC Storageworks on Tru64(RIP). And despite what our hardware experts told us, we find it is better to use raw disk and get 20%+ better disk performance. ( But then they did spell database with an O, and had to look raw up in the dictionary :-) ) The views expressed above are my own and not neccessarily the same as any sane person. Colin Bull c.bull@VideoNetworks.com