Disk striping experiences (summary)

[Anthony A. Datri]

>Convex owners mentioned 3-way and 6-way striping, so they obviously don't
>have any such limitation.

We've got an 11-way /tmp in house.  Gotta do *something* with those pesky
a partitions...

>One Convex owner said they had a setup with 5 disks on two controllers
...
>to be so.  They are running XY451D controllers and Fujitsu Eagle
>disks.  You definitely need to have the striped disks on different
>controllers, though.

It helps to have multiple controllers (isn't that *always* true?), but in
reality, ConvexOS can stripe together (if you reeeeealy want to)
any assortment of partitions, as long as they're on the same *kind* of
controller -- typically the old xy451, newer iphase 4200, or our own IDC.
You're warned, however, if you specify two partitions on the same drive.
This must be an ooooold customer -- we haven't done Eagles in a good while,
and we sell very few of those crufty xy451's any more.

Personally, I've never really been convinced that striping is always a
performance win on a real-world machine with a large number (like 80) of
simultaneous users.  If you've got n MB/sec coming through your I/O system,
does it really matter how you slice it?




(I'm just a sysadm, not a salescreature, and I try very hard to not sound like
 the latter).
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vi belongs in errno.h:  editor too big