SAN boot from XP512

[roadrunner_1]

Is there anyone in this forum has used XP512 as SAN boot. If yes,
1. what is the size of the drives used?? 73GB or 181GB??
2. How many servers have been connected to the frame.
3. What will the performance if all the servers are rebooted from SAN at the same time??

We are moving forward to implement the same but with the following...
1. 1 DKU connected to 2 ACP pairs.
2. not sure whether to go in for 180GB or 73Gb becoz of the difference in spindle speeds.

Points will be awarded.

[Alzhy]

roadrunner,

It is not the physical disk size that matters but the LUN size that will be carved out of those disks and presented as LUNS (aka disks) to the hosts. On Hitachi frames (which the HP XP512 is), you can configure an Array Group (of 4 disks) to either be RAID5 or RAID0+1 and LUNS can be presented from as little as a few hundred Megabytes to whatever is the size of your array-group (ie. for a RAID5 ArrayGroup -- you can have a LUN that is 3x181=~540GB).

Going for 73 or 181 (or even the upcoming 300+GB disks) is your choice and largely affects the capacity..

If your host supports booting off a LUN connected via a Fibre link then I do not see any reason wny you cannot do a SAN boot. I would like to thing the impact of booting on SAN lun's and the fabric infrastructure as a whole will have very miminal impact at all.

[Joshua Scott]

The 73GB 10K drives will have a faster access time. See the attached file for a comparison.

The 73gb drive costs about $340us per gb, and the 181gb costs about $221us per gb.

Not sure if that applies to you, but I do know that Windows DOES NOT support SAN boot.

HTH!
-josh

[Alzhy]

Joshua.. am I reading this right?

For the 73GB it is $340 per GB...so a disk module will cost ~ $25,000? Or is this for an array group -- 4 x 73 GB? Still pretty pricey... but that's the price you pay for being getting a very solid storage system...