Performance with FC10

[Woo Kim Chye]

I am going to set up a MCSG cluster consists of 2 A-class server and 2 FC10. The FC10 will be mirror by each other. Each FC10 has 10 disks of 18GB each.

Basically the data stored in the disk are flat data files in small size(around 500Kb). However, as FC10 is just a bunch of disks(JBOD), if I create a VG using the FC10, only 1 or 2 disk will be accessed all the time and other disk in the same VG will be idling all the time.

Is there a way I can speed up the disk accessing time for the above scenario. One of the way I can think of is the create the disk striping using the LVM. However, I heard that there are some complication if I combine the disk striping and the MirrorDisk, is this true?

Is there a hardware disk controller that can achive Raid 0/1 for FC10 (something like FC60 for SC10)?

Thanks.

[Mark Greene_1]

There's no hardware based RAID for the FC10, but what you can do instead is set the drives up in mirrored pairs, so you'd have 5 pairs of drives in each set of 10 disks. That way you can read/write to/from each FC10 simultaneously and make the most of the bandwidth. You will have to, of course, purchase and use MirrorDisk to make this happen.

If you want to get really creative and highly fault tolerant, you can set the mirrored pairs across the FC10's, such that each FC10 has a primary set of 5 drives, and the secondary set of 5 drives. That way should you lose a controller, you still have access to all of your data.

HTH
mark

[Duncan Edmonstone]

I hope you have some FC switches/hubs in your config! MCSG doesn't work with FC10 unless you are connecting through a FC hub or switch (2 for redundancy)

HTH

Duncan