Re: Informix on RAID-5

Chao Y. Din wrote: > > Koen Van der Elst wrote: > > > > >** Yes. Don't do it. You get totally blown away by the inefficiencies > > >of RAID-5. Do anything you have to do to get approval for double the > > >number of disks to implement RAID-0+1 instead. > > > > > > > I totaly agree ! Use RAID-1, get smaller, cheaper disks and lots of > > them. RAID-5 will kill of Informix. > > > > Koen > > I disagree! We are currently using RAID-5 with 60 GB hard disk from Sun and two of such servers are in > production since June 3rd. There are many other servers which are not in production yet. So I will > only address the two servers that are in production. > > We did not do fragmentation at all. Yet we have about 40 temps, two shifts. We are considering to add > another shift. The performance monitoring tool we used (SymBEL) complaint a lot about CPU overload, > slow internal hard disk. But it never complaint about the disk array. > > ChaoThere is a fairly new product out that provides RAID 5 protection for your data while addressing the typical RAID 5 performance issues. The RAID controller allows for the selective placement of data on specific disks (or LUNs) for improved performance. Specifically, through a parity-only striping feature, users can direct their information to hte drive they wish. Since no RAID controller data striping takes place, the performance of the database does not suffer from increased I/O wait time introduced by dependent objects (indexes, tables, logs) residing on the same disk (result of data striping). The host database controls the placement of data instead of the RAID controller. Additionally, you can dynamically allocate cache to the most active LUNs within your array. You can reach me at d.mcgrann@stornet.com for further info.