I'm looking for guidance on combining an A3500 disk array with a T3 disk
array into a
single vxvm volume.

This is part of an Oracle 11i upgrade, and we've been asked to create a
single volume mount
point.

Solaris 8
E5500
The A3500 has 5 trays with a mixture of 9g and 18g drives, approximately
650g usable in 4
LUNs, raid5.  We've made the LUNs approximately the same size, with a hot
spare disk in
each.

The T3 work group array is a sinble raid5 LUN with 477g usable.  The T3(s)
are fiber
attached via a SAN.

The A3500 has 2 controllers, each with 64mb cache; the T3 has 1gb cache.

So the resulting volume will have 5 disks available.  Should we make it
striped, and if so,
how many columns?  Should it be concatenated?

In the very near future, we'll be adding 2 more T3s to this volume.  At that
time, should
we unload and reload so that the data is spread evenly?

Thanks.

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Peter Vines wrote:

> I'm looking for guidance on combining an A3500 disk array with a T3 disk
> array into a
> single vxvm volume.
>
> This is part of an Oracle 11i upgrade, and we've been asked to create a
> single volume mount
> point.
>
> Solaris 8
> E5500
> The A3500 has 5 trays with a mixture of 9g and 18g drives, approximately
> 650g usable in 4
> LUNs, raid5.  We've made the LUNs approximately the same size, with a hot
> spare disk in
> each.
>
> The T3 work group array is a sinble raid5 LUN with 477g usable.  The T3(s)
> are fiber
> attached via a SAN.
>
> The A3500 has 2 controllers, each with 64mb cache; the T3 has 1gb cache.
>
> So the resulting volume will have 5 disks available.  Should we make it
> striped, and if so,
> how many columns?  Should it be concatenated?

You cant stripe different size devices, if you keep them the sizes you say
you can only concat them. Why a single volume? In my experience the
database needs space for different tables that can be mover around on the
different devices as needed with regard to performance and/or space.

If its a single table which needs more space then the biggest device, ok.

Otherwise, I would stripe the devices on the A3500 (if they are equal
size) and then concat them with the T3.

> In the very near future, we'll be adding 2 more T3s to this volume.  At that
> time, should
> we unload and reload so that the data is spread evenly?

Depends, on the way, if you still need one big volume (filesystem) you
could just concat them on on the end of the existing one, but I would
probably have added them as volumes and moved tables to them.

Not that I know that much about DB's :-/

Others here might have different views.

/Johan A