VA7100/VA7400 performance questions

[Chuck Telschow]

Hi All!

we are looking for a solution to have redundancy on data on a HP-UX N4000 server.
We have a database called Universe that does a lot of read and writes to disk in small chunks.
In order to improve performance we have striped the data among 8 disks with a stripe size of 4K. The data which is kept under a LVM approx. 150 GB.
Now there has been a requirement to have data redundancy and maintain the performance on this file system. We have been testing the "LVM Mirroring" a software solution offered by HP-UX but are not satisfied with the performance.
Sometime back I had looked at VA7100 but did not purchase due to the high price. Does this array offer stripping in sizes as small as 4K? Is this a good solution for the price? OR is there a better solution we should be lookiing at. Any help would be much appreciated.

Chuck

P.S. This thread has been moevd from Disk to Disk Arrays. - Hp Forum Moderator

[Bernhard Mueller]

Chuck,

if you want disk mirroring/redundancy and need to keep the price low *and* require good disk performance (more than a single disk can give you), I think you still need to consider SCSI HW RAID options.

For the N4000 (rp7400) that would be the A7143A 4-channel RAID160 SCSI contoller.

It supports MSA30 enclosures.

Note: You need to be on HP-UX 11.11!
If you need to stay at 11.00 the only alternative would be the older HP RAID 4Si(A5856A) which connects to DS2100/DS2300 disk enclosures.

The nice thing about the VA family is that it distributes all LUNs across all disks (of a redundancy group). So simply add disks and you gain performance. On the down side the VA is going to be discontinued in favour of the EVA (which is even more expensive...)

HTH
Regards,
Bernhard

[Chuck Telschow]

Thanks for the reply!

What can you tell me about the stripe sizing that I can use on either the VA box or using using the Raid controller you suggest? What is the advantage of going with the Raid controller as apposed to the VA box? I can buy the VA unit at a very good price refurbished and still put it on my HP support.

Thank you,

Chuck