HW Raid Controllers on PARISC Systems - will it negate need for MirrorDisk/UX?

[Alzhy]

I've never actually dealt with SmartArray Controllers on PARISC systems but are the RAID sets configurable outside of the OS? i.e. via MP/GSP?

And can I totally elimiate MirrorDisk/UX if the "disk/LUN" that I will be booting/installing to is a RAIDset LUN of the SmartArray Controller?

Subject Machine and Array Controller:

rp3410 - PA8900
SMART ARRAY 5302-2 RAID Controller

Thanks!

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Nelson,

I'm assuming you're referring to the SA6402/6404 Smart Arrays.

Yes it could negate the requirement for Mirrordisk, but you do have to think about installation and recovery of the OS.

For Integrity systems there's a ROM-based configuration tool that you can use to configure RAID in much the same way as prople can do on Proliant systems.

For PA-RISC, we're not so lucky - you need to boot off an installation CD and then start a recovery shell, load the required tools and then configure - all described here:

http://docs.hp.com/en/A9890-96014/ch01s06.html#chddbceb

Seems a bit messy to me - for small systems with not many cores the per-core license costs of Mirrordisk aren't that much more than the RAID controller,, so for the time being I's stick with Mirrordisk on PA-RISC.

HTH

Duncan

[Devender Khatana]

Hi Nelson,

Yes this is true that these controller will provide you better I/O throughput as will reduce CPU load on the system, but still for mirroring of root disks we still use the default method of Mirror-Ux or VxVm. This is since the I/O on the root VG will not be very high but for data VGs these are good cheap solutions.

HTH,
Devender