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Home > Archive > Data Storage > June 2004 > Re: Boot from SAN - Why not?
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Re: Boot from SAN - Why not?
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| The main reason I recommend having the swap and boot disks on SAN and
not DAS is for availability. If the internal disk fails, the system is
down and therefore whatever app is running on it. Even if you have
mirrors in the internal disk many systems require shutdown to replace
those disk, especially when it is scsi. The OS is just as valuable as
your application... Without it, your app is dead anyway..
THop
netwuffus wrote:
> Christian Reiter <c.reiter@gmx.net> wrote in message news:<d46fxm1zvbza$.1b6g91hjij910.dlg@40tude.net>...
>
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>
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> If you are booting several "similar" systems,
> it can be a very good idea to boot from the SAN,
> especially if your SAN storage supports things
> like lots of read-only, read-write and full copies.
>
> One of the benefits is server change management.
> If you are interested you can see a description
> in this document from 3par:
> http://www.3par.com/documents/april...gmt_OP_01.1.pdf
>
> summary from their web site:
> "Managing new patches, releases, and parameters for operating
> systems and applications across multiple servers is laborious,
> error-prone, and capacity intensive. 3PAR solves this problem
> by allowing users to maintain a few "golden boot" images and
> to distribute these tested images to countless servers using
> space-efficient read-write snapshots. Users gain a highly
> centralized, scalable solution with inimical capacity. The
> combination of space-efficiency, writeability, and the number
> of images that can be stored and distributed make this proven
> solution completely unique."
>
> -nw
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| In article <cKLvc.36755$zO3.29032@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net>, THop wrote:[vbcol=seagreen]
> The main reason I recommend having the swap and boot disks on SAN and
> not DAS is for availability. If the internal disk fails, the system is
> down and therefore whatever app is running on it. Even if you have
> mirrors in the internal disk many systems require shutdown to replace
> those disk, especially when it is scsi. The OS is just as valuable as
> your application... Without it, your app is dead anyway..
> THop
>
> netwuffus wrote:
>
I agree with many of your points. However for AIX specifically
there is no need to power off the server to replace the mirrored
internal OS/swap drives. All these systems are hot swap. Sorry,
all the new versions of the hardware are hot swap (the p630
and above servers).
Mike
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