Sun E4000 HA system & RSM 219 disks

[Jacques Grove]

Hi all,

I just subscribed to this list (after checking some of the
mailing archives.)

Anyway, I have a question about HA cluster configs and
the RSM 219 arrays.  I have a customer who is probably going
to order the following config RSN:

2 x E4001 Servers (6 x 250 Mhz x 4 Mb cache CPU's, 1Gb memory each)
2 x RSM 219 arrays (about 30 x 9 Gb disks each)
HA package, etc.

Application is Oracle-based C/S, as well as some SAP financials.
The Oracle app isn't very I/O intensive, but VERY CPU intensive,
so I'm not too worried about the I/O performance on this one.
Still, I'd like to have any comments about the RSM 219 vs 214 vs
114 (same amount of disk) performance-wise.  I figure that if the
customer wants a mission critical system, he can just as well pay
for a RSM 200-series (as opposed to a 100-series) for the extra
RAS features.

Another question is about the RAID 5 performance of this baby.
We are planning to use RAID 0+1, but RAID 5 would give us
much more disk to play with ;)  Is the RAID 5 performance really
so much worse?

Last question:  I assume that if a customer orders a system like
this now, he gets Sun Enterprise Volume manager 2.4 instead of 
Veritas 2.4.  Is this true?  Is there any difference?  As an aside,
I see that the newest Sun TPC benchmarks (out this week) was run
using Veritas 2.5


Cheers

Jacques Grove
Technical Consultant
Vector Customer Services
Cape Town
South Africa