HACMP on SAN vs. SSA

[DebiJo]

I am looking to order a new type of disks for my 2 PSeries Risc/6000 boxes (a P640 & P650). My current disks (SSA 020) are at their maximum capacity. I have plans to implement the HACMP failover technology.

Should I stick with the SSA technology and purchase D40's or look at going to a SAN? The SSA's appear to be double the money. But they are easily configurable and I am not familiar with SAN. IBM is recommending either the SSA or their FAstT700 SAN. However, they can't seem to compare their performance.

Thanks,
Debi

 

[aixat]

Hello,
The SAN is faster then SSA. Go with SAN.

 

[bonsky]

DEbijo,
Well, if you do have the budget why dont you go for SAN instead, SSA disks drawers can only go upto 160Mbps maximum data speed, and depends on the number of SSA cards that you have as well. Definitely, SAN is a trend of the future, you can immediately get an extra storage for future needs and besides it runs surely faster that SSA. Also, one advantage of SAN is going into storage consolidation. I strongly suggest you go for SAN. You dont need to worry about how to manage it for FASTts normally comes with STorage manager and its quite easy to learn.

 

[PSD]

Debijo,

From my perspectie the SAN would be the best choice, I have used EMC and HDS with HACMP many times and it outperforms SSA quite easily. As the chaps have also mentioned it is also useful for storage consolidation i.e. NT, AIX e.t.c.
Rather than have 2 X SSA you would have 2 X 6228 fiber adapters, each capable of 100 megs. a second. The big plus with a SAN is that you have a cache so once the data is written to cache it is classed as a write unlike the mechanical disks used in SSA.

There is too much really to talk about, but you do not have to stick with IBM. I prefer HDS out of all of the ones I have used.

Cheers PSD
IBM Certified Specialist - AIX V4.3 Systems Support
IBM Certified Specialist - AIX V4 HACMP

 

[Yegolev]

I thought the 6228 could do 2Gbps?

We use EMC and find it perfect for DR as well as high-performance backups. Our main db would take eleven or so hours to back up but with the EMC frame we can take a snapshot in less than 20 minutes and back it up to the 3494 library with another server. Keeps us from doing a lot of disk perfomance tuning as well since the frame handles all that. However EMC is quite pricey. IBM Certified -- AIX 4.3 Obfuscation