Re: IXS Server Cards -- MIDRANGE-L

On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 00:10, DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 6/11/2010 12:14 PM, Lukas Beeler wrote:

On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 13:24,<rob@xxxxxxxxx> Âwrote:

When we had the IXS cards we had 90 disk arms. ÂHow many disk arms does
your traditional PC server have?

In a modern environment, 2 or Zero. The rest is on the SAN. SANs are
common place nowadays, even in small shops.

Which of course makes his point. Spread your workloads across many arms.

Yes, but it sounded like the only way to do this is to buy an IBM i or
go the inefficient route and stuff every 2U server you have to the
brim (which would only give you 16 arms per machine).

IBM i and it's predecessor operating systems have had SAN like
capabilities for a very very long time.

Yes. And that's great - i could imagine the IXS cards to be a good
idea when they were launched, but things have massively changed. The
IBM i doesn't support many things a modern SAN does support.

Many shops with IBM i have zero
SAN knowledge but they know how to manage IBM i very well.

If you have PC servers, you'll need someone with PC knowledge. So i'm
not seeing this as a good argument for IXS/IXA/iSCSI attached Blades
or whatever IBM will come up with next.

ÂIf you don't SAN your disks one way or the
other, PC Server disk usage is typically above 90% full or below 10%
full,

DAS in a distributed PC environment is very inefficient - that's why
it's recommended to use a SAN.

adding disks is a pain and almost no one knows how busy the disks
are, only how full they are.

Yes, that's completly true. I miss a WRKDSKSTS equivalent in the PC
world. I usually need a combination of perfmon in the VM, perfmon on
the Hyper-V host and the SAN management software to rule out a disk
bottleneck.

In addition for the small shops a SAVE 21
that gets 'the whole 9 yards' including all the PC servers is a
wonderful thing to help you sleep at night.

Until you try to restore a DC (and have more than one). Then you'll
get an USN Rollback and your AD will be broken. You still need to
backup your integrated servers properly, using a VSS and Active
Directory aware backup software.

This is also a big issue in VMware environments, because many VMware
backup programs do not properly support VSS backups.

Backing up a SAN is mostly
backing up every individual server or making sure you have two SANs and
replicating them off-site. Wonderful if you've got a large enough
company and knowledge to manage it but not something to step into lightly.

That's why you put a hypervisor in between, and do replicated
disk2disk2tape backups. This is, of course, assuming you're large
enough to need a SAN. Most of our smallest customers just have one SBS
2008 machine sitting next to their IBM i.