Re: Informix on SUN vs HP

joanned@seanet.com wrote: > > Hello Informix World, > > I would like to hear your comments if you are using Solaris/Sun and/or > HP/HP-UX in your shop, and what your satisfaction has been with these > hardware and Operating systems. > > We have an OLTP application with a relatively small number of users > (approx 35), and a 6 gig database running under SCO today, and we > plan to mirgate to either a SUN or HP solution. We plan to grow > quickly over the next several years with the number of users approaching > 200. We are considering an HP K360 or a SUN E4000. The HP K box does > not appear to scale over 6 CPUs, but HP is convinced the performance is > competetive with Sun. > > I'm very interested in hearing about OS tools/admin tools, > the ease of allocation of disk space under RAID, and the stability > of the Informix/OS combination. We are using IDS 7.23 on a Sun E4000 with excellent results supporting 50 HR clerks. We are also using IDS 7.3 on E6000's with 20 CPUs with blinding performance for oue news servers. IDS scales beautifully and takes good advantage of both more CPUs and faster ones. Scan the past postings to CDI at the IIUG WEB site for HP and Sun complaints/raves. There is a known problem with Informix and HP. HP PA RISC CPU contains four special address registers for shared memory handles if you need more than four shared memory segments the addresses thrash and performance suffers greatly (next generation is supposed to fix this). Informix needs AT LEAST two shared memory segments, if any additional virtual segments are needed dynamically or your applications attaching to shared memory need their own shared memory this can affect you. If nothing else you have to be careful that the max shared segment size in the HPUX kernel is large enough so IDS does not need additional segments just for the two logical segments it allocates at startup. Solaris does not have a good volume manager and can only handle 4 partitions per drive. Either get the Sun Solstice Volume Manager (OEM version of Veritas), Veritas, or some other volume manager. RAID works very well with Informix. Lean strongly towards RAID 1+0, scan for my postings on the subject of RAID and databases, it is the ONLY really good RAID configuration, though the most expensive to implement. Fallback to RAID3 over RAID5. In any case change the stripe block size for ANY RAID configuration for Informix to use 8K or 16K blocks rather than the normal RAID blocksize defaults of 64K or 128K depending on the volume manager. Larger block sizes are fine for filesystems but VERY expensive and wasteful for databases and tend to defeat the purpose of striping in the first place, ie to spread I/Os over multiple spindles. Art S. Kagel