2 Questions: 1 technical 1 not.

[Robie Lutsey]

Hello everyone! I have a 2 questions.

1. I have 2 HP J5000's running HP-UX 11. We work with Geographic Information Systems and as a result have a somewhat unique file system. What happens is that we have an large amount of files in a very deep directory structure (Sometimes 10 directory's in). These files often are very small but due to the amount of files it has a tenancy to slow our system down. Here's the catch. Often we have very large (650MB+) image files we work with as well. What can I do to optimize this system?
2. Rumors have been flying about the future of HP-UX (i.e. No more development or support in X amount of years). Does anyone have solid information on it???s future?

Thanks for the help!!
Clifford Ireland

[Michael Tully · Accepted solution]

Hi,

What options are being used for the filesystem mounting? Do you have the Online JFS product? If so there are options here that can be used.
WHat sort of disk are you utilising?

As far as the future of HPUX. I would say that it would have to be around for at least five years before anything is done with it. The existing support would have to be, to hold existing clientele, even if there were movements ahead to go elsewhere. I doubt whether this timeframe would happen, but five years would a bear minimum. Even if there was some integration with something else, there would be some sort of transition link, similar to what happened when HPUX 10 was introduced.

[harry d brown jr]

(1) get an EMC Centera http://www.emc.com/products/systems/centera.jsp

(2) Don't worry about it, they have to support it for five years after the announced dead date, and being that they are in California, anyone could sue them to make them continue support/enhancements (in perpetuity) - Seriously, I know of cases as such!

live free or die
harry

[Steven E. Protter]

HP-UX is going to be around for years. HP is killing True-64 and porting HP-UX to Intel. As a matter the merger came out from talks about porting HP-UX to Compaq servers.

Online JFS should help with your technical issues. I went to HP world and got the impression that the move to vxfm is going to stop. I was encouraged during a recent support call to rip it out of my 11.11 system.

Apparently when they bought Compaq, HP acquired a pretty good filesystem either from DEC or as part of True-64. I was told be several senior HP people that this new filesystem whose name I can not remember will be ported to HP-UX.

Unrelated, True-64 had better clustering than Service Guard and important features from that product are going to show up in Service Guard.

My words are my own, I don't work for HP. Back in June, 2002, I was told LVM was dead, and vxfm was the future.

Why get rid of jfs? Because HP has to pay for the right to use it.

Steve

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,
High performance on a filesystem with a very large number of small files is much a hardware question. If possible, use a hardware raid system with a rather large (ex. 10) number of fast (15000 rpm) disk drives and a cache size of 512MB to 1GB.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Harry's EMC Centera answer is a good if your data is very static and if you can change your application. One method that I can think of that would require no software changes is to implement a hiearchical file system using OmniStorage. I would suggest a rather unusual implementation, however. Your primary cache should be solid state disk with secondary storage being conventional magnetic disk (or an array); if needed your tertiary storage might be optical disk. The beauty of this is that the system is self-tuning; files and directories that are often accessed are kept on primary cache (SSD); less often accessed files are migrated to conventional disk and seldom accessed data are migrated to the slowest media - all 'on the fly'.

I wouldn't worry about the future of HP-UX; the most likely scenario now is that the best features of Tru64 UNIX (Clustering, AdvFS) will be blended into HP-UX. DEC's Advanced Filesystem is very similar to OnlineJFS.

[Paul Sperry]

Hey Clifford

I doubt Dee will spring for a EMC Centera
But he may go for more memory?
also add more swap. Say hi to Ken.
Later