Re: Any experience with IBMs new ESS 2105 disks?

Tom,

We are using ESS, but have yet to put them in production, at least on the systems I work on.

You need to be aware of a few things to quiz your Sales Engineer on.

• Even though the stripe size is something you would normally want to calculate for maximum throughput, there's little point in doing so with ESS. The arrays don't all have the same number of disks in them, and are not even capable of having the same number of disks in them.
• Maximum rated throughput can only be achieved by getting a very high hitrate on the cache. Do the math on the various components and you will see for yourself. Granted, the cache is 8-16 Gig, but a large system may be capable of thrashing it. Notice I said *may*, as I haven't had a chance to really test it yet.
• Work with your SA to get the best possible layout for the disks. You really don't want a large number of LV's if all you get is 5 arrays. The largest logical volume that can currently be created is 96 Gig, while the array will be 100+, so you will some sharing of arrays between LV's, but it can be minimized.
• Isolate controllers as much as possible. They are usually setup so that an array has a path through 2 controllers ( for redundancy ).

HTH Jared

On Mon, 21 Aug 2000 blair_at_pjm.com wrote:

> We are thinking of moving our production database onto IBMs new ESS (Enterprise
> Storage Server) 2105 model E20. Apparently this is a new disk array for the AIX
> RS 6000 servers. We are running Oracle 7.3.2.3 OPS using raw devices.
>
> One of our DBAs opened a discussion about his on Metalink and got some ambigous
> answers. Has anyone had any negative (or positive) experiences with Oracle on
> this new product?
>
> Any info at all would be appreciated.
>
> ..tom
>
>
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> INET: blair_at_pjm.com
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Jared Still
Certified Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist ;-) Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon
jkstill_at_bcbso.com - Work - preferred address Received on Tue Aug 22 2000 - 09:30:18 CDT