topic VA7410 in Disk Enclosures

VA7410

Thatcher Furgerson_2 — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 15:57:19 GMT

First configuration question.
If I had a VA7410 and 5 additional enclosures, and was loading it with 60 x 36 GB drives, would I evenly spread the drives between the enclosures leaving 5 bays empty on each enclosure?

I have quotes for set-ups with 60x36GB drives and 26x 73GB drives. All drives are 15Krpm. Any thoughts on performance between the two set-ups or would they be negligable?

Re: VA7410

Luk Vandenbussche — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 01:27:30 GMT

The disks in the unpair slots are bundled in redundancy group 1 en the disks in the pair slots are bundled in the redundancy group 2.

It is a good idea to leave 5 bays empty on each enclosure but the capacity in each RG will be different.

With AUTORAID you have the following usefull capacity for the drives

73 GB => 66 GB usable
36 GB => 32 GB usable

Usable capacity with autoraid

26 x 73 => 1.7 TB
60 x 36 => 1.9 TB

The performance will be better with 36 GB HD, but i don't know if will see any difference in your application

Re: VA7410

Thatcher Furgerson_2 — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 09:18:03 GMT

Is there any special considerations or recommendations for AUTORAID configuration for oracle? For example, should I have a mount point on a lv for roll back, one or more for data/index, one for archive? This will be my first time with autoraid (I have an FC60 now).

Re: VA7410

Sameer_Nirmal — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 18:51:47 GMT

Considering the virtual architecture of VA Array ,it is a good to have a setup with 60X36GB spread evenly across all enclosures.

One can have good I/O performance out of VA if it has many as possible disk spindles.

VA has default operating RAID level as AutoRAID . You have option to choose RAID 1+0 for whole array while initial setup.

In the AutoRAID mode , VA uses combination of RAID 1+0 and RAID5DP . Depending on the how host access the data on the array . It automatically uses RAID 1+0 for most and Direct I/O (write intensive data ) and RAID5DP for sequencial I/O ( less write intensive data ). So you get the performance benefit ( RAID 1+0 ) plus storage cost benefit ( RAID5DP )

Selecting the RAID level depends on your oracle application behaviour and concern about storage cost.

As per HP doc, AutoRAID is good upto 50 to 200GB storage.But I have seen I/O performance issues with AutoRAID having less storage than it. So it depends on application I/O load.

If the cost of storage is not a concern, one should go for RAID 1+0 for Oracle application because with RAID 1+0 , one can have a balanced I/O throughput no matter what you have I/O pattern ( Direct , sequential , Random )

It is better to create separate Lvs for Data , Index , Redo and Archive logs.
Archive log , second pair of Redo log and a control file could be placed in RG2.