external disk for HP-UX

[Raghunandhan Srinivasan]

Hi
I am new to HP. Below are the details of my HP system. I have been asked to increase the size of some partitions. I realize that I am maxed out on internal and looking to see if I can increase it by buying an external disk-sub system & then attaching it to the single-ended SCSI on the box. Is this possible? If yes, where can I get an external and what would be the max. capacity. Will appreciate any pointers. Thx
Ragu

uname -a
HP-UX B.11.00 A 9000/820 2012091843

[Dave La Mar]

I'm sure HP would love to talk with you regarding and EVA solution. You can also browse HP's site for storage.
We have an XP512 but are looking at an EVA aa a low cost solution for our non critical data.

Let's go shopping .....

Best regards,

dl

[Sundar_7]

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/storage/entrystorage.html

Visit the above link. HP has number of entrylevel to high end boxes. How much are u looking to increase ? If it is something like < 100GB, then I would go for some more internal disks than an external enclosure.

[Michael Tully]

Can't remember what an 820 is, but you probably won't get very far with a SE SCSI connection. By all means have a look at the link provided, but depending on your budget, you might like to consider something like a second hand autoraid.

[Raghunandhan Srinivasan]

Sundar
Thx for your reply. I am looking for
< 100 Gb. The sys-admin says "maxed out an internal". How can you accomplish with internal? Thx
Ragu

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,
I think EVA is a very expensive for your need . If you just need some additional disk you can look at ds2100:
http://www.hp.com/products1/storage/products/disk_arrays/disksystems/ds2100/index.html

It is HPs "low-end" external disk system. Or, you can use most 3-party external disk boxes. You can connect your SE-SCSI to a LVD external SCSI-disk but will perhaps not get the full performance out of it.

[Raghunandhan Srinivasan]

Thx for your reply. I am OK with SE SCSI. What is 2nd handhand auto-raid. Can you give me the exact link and part number? Thx
Ragu

[Raghunandhan Srinivasan]

Thx for your reply. When I called HP, why are they not selling or suggesting them? They are saying it is 4 years old and I have no choice other than Fibre Channel enclosure. Thx
Ragu

[Patrick Wallek]

HP sales won't sell you anything but new stuff. Your best bet is to look for HP Equipment resellers. If you do a google search you will find a bunch of them.

[Raghunandhan Srinivasan]

I agree. If I have the right part (& if it is compatible with SE SCSI), then I can start looking. Thx
Ragu

[Raghunandhan Srinivasan]

Patrick
If you can tell me the exact part or a manufacturer, I would appreciate it. Thx
Ragu

[doug hosking]

Michael, I believe the 820 is the same as a D280/D380.

This would mean FWD internal disks. It's possible that some of these could be swapped out for larger disks, with the usual pain of copying data to the new drives.

If you want to go the external route, some things to look at would be the DS2100 or the C4318SZ. A useful tool is
http://partsurfer.hp.com.

The DS2100 is a rack-mountable, 1U high enclosure that supports up to 4 disks. Up to 3 DS2100 systems can be chained together on the same SCSI bus, giving you up to 12 disks. 36GB disks for these are readily available, so you could very easily get
144 GB in one box. I seem to recall that you can also get 73 GB and 146 GB drives for these but don't have time to verify that right now. We have a bunch of these DS2100 enclosures. They have worked very well for us on a wide range of HP servers.

The C4318SZ, also known as a 'SMART' enclosure, is a 3U high rack-mountable enclosure. It serves a somewhat different purpose. One of its strengths is easy
reconfigurability. You can mix and match
DVD, CD, DAT tape or disk drives in its 4 bays. This product line was discontinued a few years ago but I'll bet it wouldn't be hard to find them on ebay or through used computer equipment suppliers.

I don't recall seeing any recent single-drive external disk options from HP recently, which seems odd.

[Raghunandhan Srinivasan]

Doug
Thx for your reply. This is pretty useful info. The only problem is see is they are all LVD while I have SE. I saw that in one of the forum replies, that it is OK to mix both at the cost of performance. Also I have these Sun external disk enclosures. What if I just buy seagate drives and then put it in the enclosure, daisy chain and connect to the HP server. Right now, I am interested in functionality - more disk space.
Ragu

[doug hosking]

Yes, they're LVD, but I believe all LVD will coexist with SE at some performance penalty, assuming proper cables and terminators.
In many real-life situations I don't think that penalty is terribly severe, since things like rotational speed and seek time of the disks keep you from saturating the bus, especially with a small number of disks.

Re the Sun/Seagate disks, I'm not aware of any reason why most SE disks would not work. However I would recommend that you not use these as boot disks if you have any choice. (Historically if there's any problem using non-HP disks it tends to show up first in the boot paths, due to drive firmware differences.)

[Raghunandhan Srinivasan]

Doug (& others)
Thx for all your help. I ordered a DS 2100. Thx
Ragu