Re: Fibre Channel reliable?

Frank Tiemann wrote:
>
> Folks,
>
> we are currently looking at getting a new disk subsystem for our
> database server (100+ GB) and are considering SUN's A5000 raid
> array which is based on fibre channel.
>
> Is fibre channel reliable? Has anyone had data corruption problems with
> that particular device? Good or bad comments are welcome.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Frank

We've got a fair number of them and have had no significant problems (not that that's license to skip backups and/or mirroring of important data...). You're basically talking about replacing the 6 SCSI buses and 1 25MByte fiber link to 30 SCSI drives on the SSA's with 1 (or 2) 100 MBps fiber loop to 14 FCAL drives per box. Data placement is easier since it is very difficult to flood the loops even with all disks hammering away. Overall single disk throughput seems quite a bit better, no benchmark though.

The only thing id like to see is a big static or battery backed RAM buffer cache unit to go in front of it (like EMC or Clariion) to speed up things like database checkpoints, paging etc, but I gather that will be along hopefully sometime soon.

-- 
Greg Moye 
The above are my opinions only.