rp4440 and DS2405 or go with scsi 320?

[Rocky Lavoie_1]

Hi All,
We outgrew our L2000. Our vendor is recommending a 4440x4 with a DS2405 disk enclosure with a 2GB 4x Fiber channel interface card. We will run Mirrordisk UX for mirroring. Will this give enough disk I/O or would a hardware scsi 320 raid setup be better. We don't have the bucks for a VA7110.
Thanks,
Rocky Lavoie

[Peter Mattei · Accepted solution]

Well, if you are attching the storage to one server only and you are using Mirror UX it does not really matter if you go for SCSI or the Fibre with the DS2405. For one server you ar also better off than with the VA7110.

The advantage of the DS2405 is the distance option you have.
You can go up to 300m from the server to the DS2405. This will for example allow you to place one DS2405 locally to the server and a second mirrored one in another room/building for disaster tolerance.
If you now add a second server in that second location and put MC-Service Guard on it you have a relatively cheap and real HA solution!

The array (VA7110 or another) makes sense if you want to connect multiple servers to it. The array allows to selectively present certain LUNs to certain servers only!

Cheers
Peter

[Rocky Lavoie_1]

We have a single server and the disk enclosure will be in the same rack. The 2GB rating for the card implies it will have better I/O than scsi 320. This will hold a Unidata database with 90 users.

[Peter Mattei]

Not really. 2Gbit is 200MB/s, 320 means 320MB/s.
But at the end of the day it is almost the same.
For DBs you are anyway more interested in IOPs tha MB/s.
IOPS are directly related to number of disks and RAID level.

Cheers
Peter

[Rocky Lavoie_1]

Hi,
Thanks for the clarification.