High Availability by Walter McCullough

The Nike Array also supports up to 64Kb of
cache used to manage data internally. Use of this cache
has not shown any performance improvement for MPE/iX.
This device is configured through a separate
terminal connected to a serial port on the back panel of
the Nike cabinet. The interface allows the user to define the
level of (RAID) protection for each disk
drive within the cabinet. The cabinet also supports Hot Standby drives. The
Nike processor can
detect disk failures and automatically switch to the Hot Standby drive and use that drive until
repairs
are made and the failed drive is replaced.
EMC Symmetrix 3000
The Symmetrix 3000 is currently the high end disk product offered by Hewlett-Packard Company, in
conjunction with EMC Inc., particularly for the HP3000 and
HP9000 high availability and data center
management solutions. The Symmetrix 3000 provides a unique data capacity, protection
and
configuration of disk drives.
The Symmetrix 3000 is supported on MPE/iX
release 5.5 with a FastWide SCSI adapter firmware
release level of 3636 or greater and PowerPatch 1 or MPE/iX release
5.0 and PowerPatch 6. The
cabinet contains slots for 96 disk drives in 4Gb and 9Gb capacities. The Symmetrix 3000 manages
these disk drives as an array of disk space that can be
partitioned ,by the EMC technician,
independently of the physical disk capacity. This ability to partition means that
four 4Gb drives can be
configured to "present" a view that eight 2Gb drives are connected. This allows the System
Administrator and EMC technician the flexibility to configure
groups of disk partitions as LDEVs and
assign them to different computers.
The Symmetrix cabinet supports up to a 4Gb
cache to help reduce the number of physical I/Os to the
disk drives. The affect of the cache on system performance can vary
depending on the application's
I/O characteristics and other factors listed later in this paper.
The feature sets for this product are listed below:
Environmental
The footprint and disk capacity of the cabinet is impressive. 96 units
*
4Gb gives
approximately 3.84 Terabytes of data storage.
Heterogeneous Hardware Support
The cabinet can be shared among multiple machines running MPE/iX or HP-
UX as
well as other non HP operating systems. (Shared hardware not shared data
)
High Availability Features
The protection of data using RAID protection
algorithms along with EMC's proprietary
RAID-S mode. Hot standby of disk drives allow for automatic replacement of
failed
components.
Support
The Symmetrix cabinet is configured to "call
home" when errors are detected by the
Symmetrix processor. The "call home" feature alerts EMC to get in touch with the
customer to walk them through any problems they may encounter
or they can make
some adjustments remotely. They will also
dispatch a CE if a problem needs
immediate attention.
Other features that are not yet certified for
the HP3000 are the SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data
Facility). SRDF provides remote shadowing of data to another Symmetrix cabinet
that can be
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High Availability disk products for the HP e3000
7/18/2008
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