DS2300 and 4Si versus VA7100

[Andy Beal]

I'm looking at adding some more storage to my HP9000 rp5470. I'm trying to decide between a va7100 and FC card, or another DS2300 and 4si card. I've got my ducks in a row as far as redundancy, etc, but wondering/worried about performance. Either unit will house some Oracle datafiles. Does anyone have any comparison between using a ds2300 on a dedicated raid card versus using a VA7100, as far as access times and raw throughput? note, this is a va7100 not the newer va7110, for the money the price is about the same in this situation. I know the va7100 is bit flexible and advanced form of storage, but am I going to sacrifice raw speed for those luxuries?

TIA
Andy

[Mohanasundaram_1]

Hi Andy,

if you are asking to decide between 4si and Va7000, obviously va is a better option. both performance as well as number of problems are concerned.

VA in itself may not be an Ideal storage for a production environment. But if you are constrained by cost then you have no choice.

In my opinion raid 4Si is not a good or stable solution. there are many instances of data losses and recovery is difficult.

But I do not have any statistics to provide you.

Cheers,
Mohan.

[Naveej.K.A]

hi Andy,

VA7100 is definitely going to outperform your 4si+DS2300 combination, just for a simple logic that VA7100 has an Fibre channel interface and works at 1GBps while your DS2300 is a Ultra 3 SCSI interface and will work at maximum speed of 320MBps.

VA7100 has inbuilt RAID on the box and support, AutoRaid while your 4si card may not have the option for autoraid.

As far as redundancy and future expandability is concerned, VA7100 is the best

with best wishes
Naveej

[Mariani Alberto]

Hi all.

I'd like to point out that the bandwidths someone reported for the 4si and the fiber are incorrect: fc is available at 1 Gbps or 2 Gbps, depending on the hardware you choose.
The 4si has 4 ultra 2 channels, each providing 80 MBps. Even so, the aggregate bandwidth of the 4si is able to outperform the fc solution (note the lowercase "b" in 1 Gbps: 1 giga _bit_ per second and the uppercase "B" in 80 MBps: 80 mega _bytes_ per second; if you have to compare them, divide 1 (or 2) Gbps by 8, getting 125 (or 250) MBps: even with the conversion, 4 channels on the 4si can go as far as 320 MBps, which is of course more than the fc).

Seeing that performance-wise the comparison is in favor of the 4si solution (if the disk layout is planned out carefully, of course, and providing that the ds2300 can have its disks split among the four channels of the 4si - even two would be fine up to 10 disks), you have to consider the adding-value features of each solution.

If at some point in the future you are going to share the storage with other systems, the SAN is of course a more flexible solution.

Where i work, we have a 4si connected to a SC-10 disk-array with 10 disks configured in split-bus mode and raid 0+1, we use them to house oracle datafiles too; i can assure you that the performance is quite good.

Hope this helps,

Alberto

[Isralyn Manalac_1]

I have had several experiences with both 4si and VA and let me tell you, they were not good! Deciding between DS2300 and 4si and VA, choose the lesser evil, I'd say. Go for VA. This is not to say that VA is the best possible option you might have, though.

Good luck!

Regards,

Ira

[Ron Lawson_1]

The 4si is supported, but is an older generation RAID product. The A7143A PCI 4-Channel RAID160 SA SCSI Controller is twice as fast, and uses SmartArray technology. If you choose to go with a SCSI RAID solution, the A7143A is the recommended choice for the rp54xx servers. The supported storage for the A7143A is the MSA30. DS2300 is not supported.