Overall HP-UX performance adding some SATA to SAN

[John Jimenez]

Hi guys. I might not be posting this in the right area of the forum, but since my concern is with the HP-UX operating side I will.

Will introducing SATA drives have any negative effect on the HP UNIX O.S.?
I have Some SATA drives on my EMC CLARiiON 500x that I have not intoduced to the HP-UX hosts yet. I plan to use for Snap cloning. I am running short on disk space and am even thinking about about using these SATA for Test/Programming environments? Any way it might have a negative effect Production environments that are on a different enclosure using only 15k disks?

[Trevor Roddam_1]

John.

I'm not sure on the location; however,

Any Delays will depend on the Snap technology used.
Are you using OnlineJFS or the Array?

The OS isn't impacted; however, as always with UNIX.

If using Online JFS, there will be an impact as the changes from the original are written to the SATA disk.

If using the disk array there will be significant delays in accessing the SATA when compared to the other disk but they shouldn't impact each other after the clone is finished. SnapShot is a different story.


If the SATA is used as a seperate entity there should be no to minimal impact. If the SATA are thrashing and the OS has IO queues backed up then there will be resources used to manage this but that means you have more important issues than disk.

In short, use the EMC to SnapClone and all is OK. Just worry about the CPU and RAM requirements.

Trevor.

[John Jimenez]

That is really good information. I was going to use EMC snapclone not snap shot. I had not even took any memory requirements in mind. I will be snapshoting two 100 gig LUNS (total of 200 gig) that make up vg02. Do you have a estimate of what requiremnents I need for that?
My original question I guess was kind of silly. I was worried about creating a new raid group with these SATA didsk and introducing the new raid disk to the host. An EMC sales guy last year said that it would slow everything down... you know the saying "only as strong as the weakest link". I kind of felt that he just wanted to sell me only the higher cost drives. I had not read this, but do not know anyone running SATA with the higher quality fiber drives.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Simple answer: Probably yes.

Why? SATA disks have slower speeds, 10K or 7.2 K and less throughput.

Does it matter? If you are going to do performance tests on an Oracle database, it matters a great deal.

If you are going to stick a bunch of shell scripts on the space it will have no impact.

It will have no impact on the production environment with the 15K disks.

SEP

[John Jimenez]

Thanks SEP,
That does answer my Original question.
One of our SANS have 2 hosts running Oracle. I am no Oracle expert, so was only using these drives for snap cloning. But my SAN has a host runing Basis Pro5 ver 3.1, which is kind of a flat file database. It sounds like I can move some of my 200 gig development/test environments over there. Users will still be using /usr on the local drives to grab environment setting and temp file from /home (on 15k SAN). But the I/O should be minimal if anything at all.
I will leave this open for a couple of days just in case, Trevor, or anyone else knows of the top of their head what the requirements are to snap cloning two 100 gig LUNS (both are /vg02)? If I do not hear back soon, I will assign points and close.

Thanks again,

John