HSZ50 controllers and IO questions

From: <DINMAN_at_ALADDIN-ASI.COM>
Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 17:50:06 -0500

Good Afternoon:

Digital UNIX 4.0B
A4100s
10 4gig drives
1gig RAM
drives attached HSZ50 controller
Raid 1/0
UFS file system

Planned upgrade
add another HSZ50 controller for a total of two
add 2gig RAM for a total of 3gig
replace 10 4gig drives with 18 9gig drives.
Go to ADVFS file systems

/usr and / each are mounted to a 500meg partition

all other space is mounted to giant /all partition

mirroring and striping are accomplished at the hardware level via the HSZ50
disk controller.

We are running multiple instances of ProgressLanguage Databases (almost 60
database brokers running.)

QUESTION:
Does anybody have experience with running multiple databases in this
hardware striped environment?

My boss and I are under pressure to split up /all into multiple mounted
volumes to balance IO instead of doing it at the hardware level via the
HSZ50 hardware controller which lets the system see all of disk storage as a
single big disk. There are substantial advantages to this setup from both
the sysadmin and database administrators perspective. For example, all the
databases can reside in a single directory called /all/databases even if
multiple databases exceed 1gig. There is no wasted space. Uptime is
critical so we want to get this right the first time and not go back and do
it again.

I have real concerns about I/O bottlenecks, but I have been extraordinarily
impressed by the performance of the HSZ50 controller to this point.

QUESTION 2

I am familiar with the sar utility for measuring IO performance. Can
anybody suggest other DEC specific utilities which will let me identify
bottlenecks? I need something that I can setup to automatically collect and
store data with for eventual use in Excel spreadsheets.

Thanks for your help

Dale
Dale Inman
Unix Systems Admin
Aladdin Industries
615-748-3242 v.
615-748-3030 f.
Received on Wed Apr 22 1998 - 00:54:12 NZST

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