Many users have already been experiencing diminished hardware
support from HP. It is only natural, as HP has less incentive to train
their Customer Engineers (CE's) on the MPE/iX operating system
environment. While they may know the hardware, they won't know VOLUTIL.
You can help yourself be less susceptible to hardware failures, and
therefore less reliant on HP's hardware support. In this, and future
issues, we'll show you how.
In future issues of the Resource 3000 Newsletter, we will continue this
theme of providing you with information about what you can do to ensure
your disk drives, printers, and other hardware devices are maintained
and operational. This issue addresses one of the most important aspects
of your system - the data stored on your disk drives.
Our CE's know the MPE/iX operating system. Other CE's may not. The key
to minimizing the impact from CE's with minimal knowledge the e3000 is
to reduce the complexity of swapping out bad disk drives.
The easiest way to do this is to replace your non-hot swappable disk
drives with hot swappable disk drives in a RAID environment. RAID is
short for "Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks". It is
a category of disk drives that employ two or more drives in combination
for fault tolerance and performance. These drives are typically "hot
swappable", which means you can swap out a bad disk on the fly, easily
and without a lot of background in computer hardware.
With the proliferation of inexpensive hot swappable RAID Arrays now
available in the used market place, this is a very cost-effective
solution.
. You can swap out the bad drive yourself
. No need to place a service call and risk an inexperienced CE
. Swapping is immediate, limiting your down time
. Your service contract will provide a new disk drive
Remarketed disk arrays are readily available at a good price. Two we
recommend are the A3549A Model 20 SP620 Deskside Array and A3550A Model
20 SP620 Rackmount Array. Known also as the "Nike" arrays, they are
readily available and support both RAID 1 (mirroring) and RAID 5 (data
striping). Be sure to purchase an array with dual phoenix (SP620)
controllers and redundant power supplies to maximize disk availability.
You will also need two dedicated FWD controllers installed on your server.
(Call us if you have questions)
The Nike disk array is controlled by what is called a "flare code." You
don't need to know what this is or how it is used, but you do need to
make sure your remarketed Nike disk array does have the latest version
of flare code, or it will be in an unusable state. When you purchase
your array, tell them you want "1 each boot disk with the latest version
of flare code."
Flare code 9.55.01 (or later) and PROM code 0173 (or later) are required
for the array controller. Do not let anyone sell you a Nike array
without a boot disk!
The support for RAID drives on your system will depend on your version
of MPE/iX. MPE/iX 6.0 supports 9 GB and 18 GB disk drives. However, the 9
GB and 18 GB drives are supported as RAID 1 only, not as RAID 5, since
this would exceed the 18 GB volume limit currently in effect.
RAID 1 provides data mirroring, while RAID 5 provides data striping at
the byte level and also stripe (track) error correction information.
This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance.
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To manage your Nike Array, there is a built in utility called
"Grid Manager." To access Grid Manager you will need an ASCII terminal
configured as VT100(EM100) or Reflections with VT100 emulation to
connect to the controller console port.
From Grid Manager you can configure your disks, run offline diagnostics
and examine an events log to diagnose problems. Make sure your 28696A
FWD adapters are running firmware revision 3728 or later. LDEV 1 is
supported as a boot drive on the Nike with SP620 (PHOENIX) controllers.
LDEV 1 capacity however is limited to 4 Gbytes (due to NIO IODC limits).
The SureStore Model E Disk Array 12H, also known as the Model 12H
Autoraid Array, is supported on MPE as both a boot device and a user
volume. AutoRaid 12H usage rules are:
. Model 12H AutoRAID is supported using firmware revision 56
. Controller Mode should be set to Normal
. X Controller to be connected to the e3000, Y controller unconnected and terminated
. Rebuild priority should be set to High . Logical Unit Number (LUN) (0) must
be configured
. HBA 28696A FWD adapter firmware release 3728 or better
. Support will only be allowed on a dedicated SCSI bus, with no other types of
devices (homogeneous bus environment)
. Daisy chaining of two or more model 12H is supported within the recommended
SCSI configuration
Our recommended SCSI Configuration For optimal system performance, we
recommend a maximum of 8 LDEVs per SCSI bus. Having nine or more LDEVs
configured will cause performance degeneration under high I/O loads.
The single X controller is the only connection to the HP e3000
supported. We recommend that you purchase the second Y controller to
avoid total controller failure. The second controller will be able to
take over when swapped into place because it maintains a copy of the
current firmware and disk maps. If your 12H contains 12-18Gb disk
drives, we recommend configuring each of the LUNs for 11Gb of storage.
This configuration has given the best performance versus capacity. This
capacity allows for RAID1 and available space for two hot spare disks.
Total capacity of the LUNs should not exceed 90Gb to ensure optimum
performance.
We also recommend that you set Data Resiliency Mode "Normal."
However, some users have reported very slow Restore speeds with Normal
mode. To correct this problem, set the Data Resiliency Mode to
"Performance Mode" only during the restore. Remember to reset the mode
back to Normal when your large restore is completed.
Set Rebuild Priority to High. This may cause some degradation in your
online transaction response times (probably not noticeable), but will
reduce the likelihood of encountering a disk mechanical failure while
the system is still recovering from a previous disk mechanical failure.
We hope this information helps you to improve your confidence in your
system. For additional information or questions, contact us.
Resource3000 is dedicated to ensuring the continuation of your
significant investment in the HP3000 platform.
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