On Wed, 31 Jan 2001, RaghuNath L wrote:
> > Dear Chris,
>
> EMC in our place has unix ware as os and rest is solaris and linux (with some
> winDoze also)
> go to www.platform.com for more details.
>
Yes we run LSF at our shop also...we have an AFS cell (AFS now Opensource
woowoo www.openafs.org) with Kerberos authentication and LSF integrates
well with that.
> there are two server ccasesvr1 and 2
> 1. The EMC consists of 2 portions - a disk array component called the Symmetrix and
> a file server component called
> the Celerra. The Celerra has SCSI connections to the Symmetrix and has in all about
> 40 n/w interfaces of 100 Mbps
> each.
>
> 2. Hosts can be connected to the EMC either direct attach to Symmetrix or network
> attach thru Celerra.
>
> 3. ccasesvr1 and ccasesvr2 are direct attached to Symmetrix using FCAL. So
> tmpdir1....tmpdir4 on each of these can
> for all practical purposes be considered as local disks. The n/w interfaces of EMC
> do not come into play here. These are
> UFS filesystems on the ccasesvr's and not NFS. You can see them when you do a df
> -kFufs on these boxes.
>
> 4. There is no ethernet connection between Symmetrix and ccasesvr. There is a FCAL
> connection. There is ethernet
> connection between Celerra and ccasesvr.
>
> 5. Wherever you use remote pools, ccasesvr's access Vob/View databases from EMC
> using FCAL and remote pool data
> from EMC using the n/w.
>
> 6. It runs on Unix Ware for i don't know the processer type it manages the disk
> storage.
> Hope this is clear. Please revert back if you need further clarification.
>
>
>
It's interesting to hear about your setup...I'm not familiar with the
Celerra NAS product as it's of no use in our enviroment...it may well run
Unixware I've no idea.
But the issue was whether the Symmetrix runs Unixware. It does not. It's
just an (albeit very expensive) hardware RAID box. The only thing that
runs *on* the Symmetrix is their (EMCs) microcode. That's a big part of
their whole pitch...they contend that because they run their own custom
microcode on their box that it performs better and is more reliable than
if it was running a higher level OS.
But the hosts that attach to the Symmetrix just see raw disks...whether
they are running MVS or Novell or some flavor of Unix or whatever...so
filesystem integrity is subject to and limited by whatever the filesystem
of the OS you have attached to it is capable of. What you're buying the
Symmetrix for is for highly available disks *not* filesystems. Which is a
non trivial distinction.
Another gotcha with Symmetrix (at least in my mind) is that there's no
built in data path integrity. So you've spent all of this cash and you
still can be taken out by a single HBA or port or controller cable
failure.
EMC does have have an additional product called Powerpath that you can
install on your hosts that multiplexes I/O and provides failover between
multiple disk controllers. Note that there is no Linux version of
Powerpath.
Chris
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