Sun, July 9, 2006 - 10:12 AM
Last night we had a major computer upgrade planned for our mainframe at the office. I am in charge of all of the machines in the office (one west coast and one east coast) and in hte disaster recovery center for our company. We installed a new system recently, a pair of IBM P650 systems each with 8 CPUs, 64gb memory and a couple of terrabytes of disk storage on an HP surestore SAN (in non-technical terms, a whole bunch of disk drives that can be put together in really cool ways).
In order to get a performance boost, I decided to install a second SAN. You see, I did some analysis and determined that a major issue was I/O speed. This is known because the I/O wait time (the amount of CPU used just to wait for the disks) was very high.
The upgrade consisted of moving to the new SAN, from a 32 disk stripe set (raid 0+1) to a 144 disk stripe set (raid 0+1), and from four 1-gigabyte disk controllers to 12 of them. That's about as fast an I/O system as the P650 will support.
Last night we began the process of moving to the new SAN. As you can imagine, it's not a simple process to move a couple of terrabytes of data around, especially because we wanted to split up the Oracle database so that the indexes, redo logs and data were on seperate controllers and arrays (sets of disks).
Is anyone still with me?
The procedure went very well, actually, with only a minor panic here and there, when, for example, Oracle wouldn't start up. But it went on until the wee hours of Sunday morning.
So now I have a couple of brand new refrigerator-sized cabinet in the computer room containing 144x2 disks ((plus another dozen as hot spares). This gives me 6 of these cabinets total.
Of course, now we need to upgrade the power and air conditioning if we want to add anything else...
And since someone invited Murphey, of course we had problems with a dozen other systems which have nothing to do with this project at all. Maybe they were lonely?
Lee R. Green (Sun, July 9, 2006 - 10:55 AM)
WHEN are they gonna get us those holographic drives they promised us 10 years ago? Unlimited speed and storage, virtually no wait time? or am I just dreaming?
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