new ids config

[Craig Haarmeyer]

I'm looking for an opinon as to what would be the desired or, perhaps best
way to configure a fresh ids install. I have considered many combinations
here and would appreciate any informed opinion. Here is my situation thus
far:

HP-UX 11.0
HP-MirrordiskUX
4 9Gb HDD's
IDS 9.x

primary drive has OS. The engine is installed to /opt/informix.(same
physical disk).
The OS handles the mirroring so far. I was thinking that I would let the OS
handle all mirroring, however, if I want to use raw disk space I don't even
know if UX can mirror it. Can it? How?
It's a small but vital database and only 25+ users.....performance is an
unknown, so, does cooked db space make any sense whatsoever? Perhaps that's
a call for me to make. Oh, yes, forgaot to mention: two tape drives....one
for the unattended backups of the OS and one for ontape? I prefer daily full
system backups + daily dbspace backups.
I'm coming from an antiquated system (two 2Gb HDD, one is a mirror. SE, the
OS and the dbspace all on the same disk) so the possibilities are blinding
me.
I have two 1Gb file systems on the second physical drive mirrored by another
HDD straight across and had planned on putting my dbspaces on those two file
systems but I am now questioning that approach of cooked space.
What would you do?

Thanks,
--ch

[Art S. Kagel]

I don't know if HPUX can mirror RAW space but I doubt it. If you cannot
get hardware/firmware level mirror (ie a RAID1 array) then use Informix
mirroring with RAW devices. The performance gained from RAW space will
VASTLY outway the minor loss from using Informix mirror versus OS mirror.
Informix's benchmarks show its own mirroring VERY close behind OS level
mirror in performance and if you are using PDQ and have multiple CPUs
IDS will use BOTH sides of mirrors it knows about (ie its own) to increase
parallelism. Hardware mirror is always best by far but OS mirror is behind
and much better than Informix mirror on the same COOKED devices/files.
But I strongly suspect that using RAW device with Informix mirror will be
a bit better still.

Art S. Kagel

[Scott Black]

-----Original Message-----
From: Carlson@WHSmith [mailto:carl...@bellsouth.net]
Sent: Friday, May 19, 2000 4:34 PM
Posted To: informix
Conversation: new ids config
Subject: Re: new ids config

"Art S. Kagel" wrote:
>
* I don't know if HPUX can mirror RAW space but I doubt it
[clipped]

John Carlson wrote:
As far as I know, HPUX can mirror at the rawspace level, through LVM.
[clipped]

This is correct. We use it without any problems, and the setup is
fairly easy.

[Art S. Kagel]

Scott Black wrote:
>
> "Art S. Kagel" wrote:
> >
> * I don't know if HPUX can mirror RAW space but I doubt it
> [clipped]
>
> John Carlson wrote:
> As far as I know, HPUX can mirror at the rawspace level, through LVM.
> [clipped]
>
> This is correct. We use it without any problems, and the setup is
> fairly easy.

Certainly through an LVM there should be no problem. I thought we were
discussing native HP mirrored filesystems.

Art S. Kagel