RE: SAN was RE: system p announcement (Crump, Mike)

I would use PT400 to see how the HBA is performing and if I need a
faster connection to the SAN. If my HBA and associated IOP is not over
taxed and I am having a performance issue, I would go to the SAN
management tools to see if I am IO bound there. Same goes with poor
TCP/IP performance on your iSeries. Is you LAN adapter over taxed, the
associated IOP, the connected switch or your whole backbone? The
iSeries PT400 can only tell you what is going on with the IOP and IOA,
not your LAN.

Chris Bipes
Director of Information Services
CrossCheck, Inc.
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Walden H. Leverich
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2007 10:12 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: RE: SAN was RE: system p announcement (Crump, Mike)

I know that might be difficult for non-IBM vendors but
minimally I think that PT/400 needs to be able to integrate the SAN
performance information.

The big problem with that is a san can have IOs from multiple systems on
a single drive array where PT400 can only see its own data. If I've got
an array w/a System i and SQLServer banging away on it (not saying it's
smart, but lets say I do) each system-specific view would show, say 50
IO/second, but only the SAN would know I was doing 100 IOs per second on
the array. The point of a SAN is that the storage _is_ abstracted above
the OS, you can't therefore use OS specific tools to monitor/understand
the SAN.