RE: iSeries Disk Pricing

We're running very large Oracle databases on an HP/Hitachi SAN.  It's
foundation is 4-Disk RAID groups of _73GB_ disk drives.

The disk and database performance is amazing.  To me, the architecture is
reminiscent of the AS/400.  My Oracle DBA's have been complaining for years
about the need to spread tablespaces, logs, and rollbacks across acres of
dedicated spindles.  We used to joke that DBA's would prefer an array of
eighteen 1GB drives to an 18GB drives.  Now they trust the system
administrator to logically locate their Oracle objects across multiple
segments of RAID groups.  The SAN's processors (and gobs and gobs of cache)
to me are kind of like an evolved IOP.

Finally, they've gotten over the fact that 4GB drives are obsolete and 8GB
drives are on the way out.  If the SAN becomes easier to manage and we're
able to dumb down some of the more annoying Oracle tasks maybe this
environment will start to look like DB2/400.

(It's also bloody expensive, but no one complains about how much it costs.)

-Jim

James P. Damato
Manager - Technical Administration
Dollar General Corporation
<mailto:jdamato@dollargeneral.com>


-----Original Message-----
From: Andy Nolen-Parkhouse [mailto:aparkhouse@attbi.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 01, 2002 10:05 AM
To: midrange-l@midrange.com
Subject: RE: iSeries Disk Pricing


Rob,

Arms are arms, and on a database transaction system they frequently are
the most significant limiting factor on performance.  In the case of
currently marketed or announced disk drives for the iSeries, the 8.5 GB
and 17 GB drives have the same performance metrics.  My point was
practical, as opposed to theoretical.  For those transaction-based
systems which have excess capacity using 8.5 GB drives because disk-arm
count was a performance limiting factor, they will need to purchase the
same number of 17 GB drives to duplicate the same performance.

Those systems will save no money based on the price reduction of the 17
GB drives.  Yes, they will have capacity to archive data, keep more
history, and other good stuff; but they will not save money.

IBM may announce new hardware which makes your point, but as of this
time, they have not.

Regards,
Andy Nolen-Parkhouse