Expanding storage capacity

[Henry Chua]

Hi Guys,

I currently have a workstation model: 9000/782/J2240, and running: HPUX B.10.20 A 9000/782 2006477386. Is it possible to know what is the maximum storage capacity I can mount on the system. I addition, is there any other way to externally expand the storage on this system?

Thanks
Best regards
Henry

[Steven E. Protter]

Lots of ways to add storage.

If you have a scsi card, you add a JBOD (just a bunch of disks) with hundreds of GB of capacity depending on the size of the disks.

You can put in a fiber card and access several Terrabytes of disk on an external disk array like an XP-256 or EMC array.

I don't know any hard limit. If the disk can be properly presented, your machine can find it on ioscan and use it.

SEP

[Bill Hassell]

Although 10.20 is totally obsolete, it does not have any practical limits for external storage. IF you have a *lot* of money, you can connect thousands of Gb of disk, limited to logical volumes of 128Gb or less.

[Henry Chua]

Thanks for the info guys,

I am just curious, I was being told by my contractors that my system has already reached in maxumum capacity, so this is untruth?

the #ioscan -fnCdisk gives:
# ioscan -fnCdisk
Class I H/W Path Driver S/W State H/W Type Description
============================================================================
disk 7 8/0/4/0.2.0 sdisk CLAIMED DEVICE SEAGATE ST39204LW
/dev/dsk/c3t2d0 /dev/rdsk/c3t2d0
disk 8 8/0/4/0.3.0 sdisk CLAIMED DEVICE SEAGATE ST39173W
/dev/dsk/c3t3d0 /dev/rdsk/c3t3d0
disk 9 8/0/4/0.4.0 sdisk CLAIMED DEVICE SEAGATE ST39173W
/dev/dsk/c3t4d0 /dev/rdsk/c3t4d0
disk 0 8/4/19/0.5.0 sdisk CLAIMED DEVICE IBM DDRS-39130WS
/dev/dsk/c0t5d0 /dev/rdsk/c0t5d0
disk 1 8/4/19/0.6.0 sdisk CLAIMED DEVICE IBM DDRS-39130WS
/dev/dsk/c0t6d0 /dev/rdsk/c0t6d0
disk 2 8/12/5.0.0 sflop CLAIMED DEVICE TEAC FC-1 HF 07
/dev/floppy/c1t0d0 /dev/rfloppy/c0t1d0 /dev/rfloppy/c1t0d0
disk 3 8/12/5.2.0 sdisk CLAIMED DEVICE TOSHIBA CD-ROM XM-6201TA
/dev/dsk/c1t2d0 /dev/rdsk/c1t2d0

and bdf gives:

Filesystem kbytes used avail %used Mounted on
/dev/vg00/lvol3 83733 20186 61035 25% /
/dev/vg00/lvol1 47829 19057 27337 41% /stand
/dev/vg01/lvol1 34170737 18 30753645 0% /wfbm
/dev/vg00/lvol8 207461 161477 39760 80% /var
/dev/vg00/lvol7 600571 314971 267582 54% /usr
/dev/vg00/lvol9 5441815 241230 5037330 5% /users
/dev/vg00/lvol6 30597 7487 22192 25% /tmp
/dev/vg00/lvol5 600571 318592 263961 55% /opt
/dev/vg00/lvol4 19861 44 19221 0% /home

.. from your experience can u enlighten me on how should I go able with the expansion..

Best regards
Henry

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

These are standard SCSI disks so you are limited on SCSI addresses. If you do not have an additional SCSI I/O installed, then you can rip out the small 9Gb disks, attach an external disk array of thousands of GB and reinstall everything on the new array.

Now you didn't mention whether a budget is important. If you don't a few hundred thousand for a terabyte array then yes, you are severely limited as there are no free SCSI addresses. So capacity in your case is the quantity of disks. bdf doesn't give enough information to determine how the disks are laid out, but it appears that most of the disks are part of vg01 which has a 34Gb lvol. If you want, you could backup all the data on /wfbm, export vg01 and then shutdown to replace the 9Gb disks with 36Gb or even 72Gb disks. Then reboot and rebuild vg01. You'll have 4x more storage.

[Cem Tugrul]

What's your lvmtab ?
strings /etc/lvmtab

[Henry Chua]

Hi Cem,

the info you requested..
# strings /etc/lvmtab
/dev/vg00
/dev/dsk/c0t6d0
/dev/vg01
/dev/dsk/c3t2d0
/dev/dsk/c3t3d0
/dev/dsk/c3t4d0
/dev/dsk/c0t5d0

Thanks..

[Cem Tugrul]

Hi Henry,

if am not wrong your bdf shows that you do not need any capacity anymore.

/dev/vg01/lvol1 34170737 18 30753645 0% /wfbm

you have 4 physical disks for vg01
/dev/dsk/c3t2d0
/dev/dsk/c3t3d0
/dev/dsk/c3t4d0
/dev/dsk/c0t5d0

But i think it is more important that why
your rootvg only has a physical disk;
/dev/dsk/c0t6d0

if this WS important for you than you should
mirror vg00 so you can take the disk /dev/dsk/c0t5d0
and exteng vg00 then mirror it...
if you want to know your physical disk capacity then;
i-run SAM
or
#diskinfo /dev/rdsk/c0t6d0
you can run this command for your each physical disks.

Good Luck,