FC10 Configuration Recommendation

[Keith Hickox]

I am putting together a file server using an A class cpu and an FC10 with 8-36GB disks. Typical type of data stored will be CAD (Mentor) data. There will be lost of files, and the file size range anywhere from 10KB to 350KB. I plan on mirroring the data. Would it make sense to also do disk striping? I do have HP's mirror disk product. Thanks in advance.

[Bill McNAMARA_1 · Accepted solution]

Yes striping is an option, however you probably won't notice a massive increase in perf unless you load your fc10 fibre links on traffic balanced loops. ie try not to access all ten disks or mirror on the same fibre channel loop. This is done during vg creation, although I'm not sure if it's supported by hp to access 5 disks in the FC10 via one LCC and the other 5 disks in the same FC10 via the other LCC or whether they say use the second LCC just for a failover loop....

Later,
Bill

[harry d brown jr]

You can not use HP striping and HP mirroring (MirrorUX) together, but there are other ways, check this thread out:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x88a753921f1ad5118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html

Also, with an FC10, especially if you have only one, make sure the "DIAL" on the top and bottom are set to ZERO, for simplicities sake. With the FC10, you have 4 Fibre "ports". Two are Primary, and two are expansion ports. Each port can see ALL of the disks in the FC10. I recently connected three different systems to a single FC10, two (an N-class with 6 virtual partitions) using the primary ports, and one (an A-class) via the expansion port.

In your FC10 Manual, on page 75, you will see "loop ID's and Hardware Paths", this will help you determine which disk is which.

[Paul Alberts]

What about mirroring extent-based stripe sets?!