IDS Forum

RE: XPS or IDS customers using SANs?

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Date:

Hi Fred,
We use XPS 8.32 onbar omniback 4.1 with EMC symmetric 4680 Raid S
I have great performance and no issues for 3 years.

who is the customer? Lucent Technologies
how much data are they storing? 350 Gig
which platform is the server on? HPUX 11.0 9000 V220 & L300
what storage vendor is being used?
has the customer had any issues? None
would the customer be a good success cases? Yes
The major issues I had were earlier releases of XPS.
With latest version I tested how long XPS would stay up and it was 256 days.
At that time SA had a upgrade to perform on the server which required a reboot.
Thanks

Carl W Berner - Team Lead Informix/Oracle DBA
IBM Global Services - Serving Lucent Technologies
Work : (770) 750 5225
Pager: 1-800-759-8888 Pin#1615039
Email: cberner@lucent.com



-----Original Message-----
From: dan.michael.... [mailto:dan.michaelis@verizon.com]
Sent: Friday, February 28, 2003 8:28 AM
To: ids@iiug.org
Subject: Re: XPS or IDS customers using SANs? [542]



Fred, Paul, and Jim,

I can tell you that Verizon has moved almost exclusively to SAN storage for
their internal data. They have chosen EMC as the primary vendor (there are
some other solutions present, but I have not worked with any of them, and I
am not certain whether Informix is being used on any of them). From an
issues perspective, I believe the EMC arrays to be generally more reliable
than any other non-SAN solutions that I have worked with. We have had one
hardware "hiccup" that I am aware of; it was not on an Informix system, and
it was not database related. Regarding success case/story, I can't state
one way or another, in part because the hardware side of the business is
strongly segregated from the database side, so I am not necessarily aware
of all of the issue, and in part because I don't have a Verizon/non-SAN
background, so I have no point of comparison.

I can categorically state that we have had the most success when we have
treated our SAN solutions in the same way that we would treat non-SAN
disks; data placement, physical disk (spindle) separation of data, etc. are
all important factors in maintaining good performance from these vendors.
In general, the vendor has configured the hardware according to our
requests, and then our sysadmins allocate the defined LUNS to the operating
system. We had one case (non-Informix) where the disk was striped
inappropriately, and caused a very measurable performance degradation in
the application. In this case, the vendor configured stripe sets at the
hardware level (something that we don't do at this point; mostly for
flexibility) inappropriately, and our data placement (due to lack of
transparency to the disk arrays) turned out to have all of our heavily hit
data residing on only 4 physical disks. Once the striping issue was
resolved, and we examined and corrected our data placement, we improved our
application performance by a factor of more than 20%. This was not an
Informix application (it was a database application; approximately 700GB
allocated, 650GB used), but I believe that the exercise applies across
database platforms.

I would be more than happy to talk more about SAN solutions offline, should
anyone need to contact me.

Thanks.

Dan Michaelis
813.978.6534 (office)
813.303.3225 (pager)
dan.michaelis@verizon.com


|---------+---------------------------->
| | "FEDERICO HU...."|
| | <fred@iiug.org> |
| | Sent by: |
| | forum.subscriber@|
| | iiug.org |
| | |
| | |
| | 02/27/2003 11:25 |
| | PM |
| | |
|---------+---------------------------->
>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| |
| To: ids@iiug.org |
| cc: |
| Subject: XPS or IDS customers using SANs? [539] |
>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|




Folks, if anyone is using XPS or IDS and SANs, please let me know. More
information follows my signature.

Thanks,

Fred Hubbard
IIUG

-o-

I need to know if there are any XPS or IDS customers using SANs. If you
know of any, please reply with:

who is the customer?
how much data are they storing?
which platform is the server on?
what storage vendor is being used?
has the customer had any issues?
would the customer be a good success cases?

Any information would be helpful even if you don't have all of what I've
asked.

-- Paul Taylor and Jim Troisi

Messages In This Thread

• XPS or IDS customers using SANs?
  FEDERICO HUBBARD -- Thursday, 27 February 2003, at 11:25 p.m.
  • Re: XPS or IDS customers using SANs?
    dan.michaelis@verizon.com -- Friday, 28 February 2003, at 8:28 a.m.
    • RE: XPS or IDS customers using SANs?
      Berner, Carl (Carl)** CTR ** -- Friday, 28 February 2003, at 12:18 p.m.
  • RE: XPS or IDS customers using SANs?
    Weaver, Bill -- Friday, 28 February 2003, at 2:09 p.m.

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