Upgrade OS or Upgrade H/W.......?

[Keith Connolly_1]

Greetings

I'm managing a HP Serviceguard cluster consisting of 2 N4000 servers both with 8 X 440MHZ CPU's and 16Gb of memory, running HP-UX 11.0 and connected to to an EMC Symmetrics with ~ 6TB of storage.

The systems are circa 5+ years in production and have gradually become quite constrained from both a processing and storage point of view. Reliability is not a problem - capacity and performance ( having enough of ) are of concern.

We patch the twice anually incidentally following a performance analysis and evaluation

My question is whether I should consider upgrading the OS to HP-UX 11.?? and what
gains or improvments I could expect to see and opposed to investing time in looking at replacing the hardware

Thanks

-Keith

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

I would upgrade the hardware.

Purchase new hardware, install the new OS cold, make sure you have plenty of memory.

Build your cluster, install your applications and plan a transition to a new Cluster.

Thats the safer, more reliable, less time pressrued way to get new OS and more capable hardware.

SEP

[Alzhy]

I'd go for a hardware refresh -- 5+ years is usually the end of projected life for most production systems. And depending on your growth projections - a good pair to replace your venerable N4000's would be 2 rp4440's OR 2 rp7420's.

Storage -- up to you. You've got EVA5K or the HItachi based XP line if going for an HP storage.

[Mark Greene_1]

Before doing anything I would determine where the processing constraints are. For example, if you are IO bottlenecked, more memory or faster CPUs are not going to change that.

I'd also look at the new EMC CX700. If you have the cash to buy new storage, I'm sure EMC will give you an attractive trade-in on your Symmextrics.

mark

[Geoff Wild]

If the CX700 is a Clariion - then no - it is not supported on MC/SG....move to DMX1000 or 2000...

I would upgrade the HW/OS...

RP7410's should be adequate...you can do a rolling upgrade - replace 1 node at a time...

Rgds...Geoff

[eran maor]

Hi

as all performance expert know , replacing a hardware allway improve the performance .

i will also recommend on rp7200 or rp8400 ,

but you must know that hp-ux 11.00 will be supported until 2006 and there isnt any more fixes to this o.s .

my recommended is to move to the new hardware that will run the hp-ux 11.11

you can also thing about hp-ux 11.23 ( there is now a new version also for pa-risc ) , but just upgrading the o.s will not give you a lot of improvement to the performance .

eran

[Keith Connolly_1]

Many thanks for the swift response(s)

Hardware replacement is the way I usually go with systems over 4-5 years old.
Because this is an ERP system, I reckon that I just needed to hear the same advice / message a few more times.

We plan on opening a facility in Asia in the next 6 months that will potentially add between 20-30% capacity, my problem is aquiring the funding before this occurs and in the meantime keeping the application,middleware and database people happy - wish me luck ( I need it !)

-Keith