How Many Servers are connected to your EVA3K/5K?

[Alzhy]

EVA's are shared front-end arrays (HSV to Switch bandwdith is shared by however many servers are connected to your Fabric Switch..).. I'd like to know, how many servers have you connected to your EVA on your SAN?

[Mike Naime · Accepted solution]

Our first EVA5K with 18 shelves of 146GB disks spans 4 fabrics to provide Oracle RMAN BACKUP drives to about 200 production VMS/AIX servers. All of the RMAN backups are written to this EVA nightly. After that, the data is then snapped and spooled to tape(s). This sucker is busy about 20 hours of each day.

[Alzhy]

Hi Mike.. thanks for sharing your environment.

But do you actually use your EVA for live data ie.. VMS/AIX database storage that are heavy I/O users? Or do you just use it as a disk device for backups and its clone-ability..?

[Mike Naime]

Our first was used exclusively for backups. This has the highest connection count that your question asked about. Our second, third, ...Etc. was used for production clusters because we are not buying HSG's anymore. because you seemed to be mainly interested in total # of servers connected. I did not mention them.

My observation on our Compaq (HSG80) SAN has been that the VMS systems do not hit the SAN as hard as an AIX system running the same Application with a similar workload.

The OS's utilize the storage in different fashions. What works great for VMS does not necessarily work for AIX. Then again. Multi-pathing is part of the VMS OS and Alphaserver Firmware. It is a Securepath Add-on to our AIX systems.

I have not seen similar problems with our MS systems, but they are just loading code warehouses (refreshes) from shares for 1000+ Citrix Server. They are not that heavily taxed. Not like an Oracle DB is.

[Mike Naime]

Nelson:

Is moving about 20TB in and out of the EVA each day (40 Terrabytes total movement) considered taxing the EVA system? :-)

In comparison our production clusters are not that heavily used if you look at Switch port throughput.