Some general questions

[Joerg]

Hi there,

I'm pretty new with 3par and I'm still in the process of trying and testing. I'm pretty experienced with emc² CX3-40 therefore I'm trying to understand the 3par concept for planning the migration.

In advance I have to say that I'm still a bit unsatisfied with our current technical support here in Germany. Hard to get a SE with knowledge that fits our needs - there really seems to be lack of resources after the 3par -> HP merger.

1. Need to migrate AIX/HACMP clustered Database (Informix - but that's not the point) from CX3-40 to 3par. I discovered the Open Migrator on emc²'s PowerLink and it looks good for our needs. Any experience with that tool?

2. Would it make sense in *ANY case to have thin provisioned VV's for databases? As said: we have Informix (using symbolic links to raw logical volumes) and we also have Oracle RAC using ASM (which ales need to be migrated of course).

3. Our main system is a F400 with 96 Spindles (15k FC only). Does it make sense to separate spindles for let's say Informix and Oracle? Is it really a good idea to have full-wide-spreading with all spindles for all "areas": Informix, Oracle, NFS Shares and vSphere datastores?

4. Our backup system is a smaller F400 with "only" 48 spindles. We are going to use RC copy via RCIP (1 GB bandwidth). The first write performance tests show up a ~3,5times decreased I/O rate (for massive seqential writes via 'dd if= of=' test) when using synchronous RC. Using periodic RC there was no difference. What are the Pro's and Cons's ?


In general I'm still a bit disappointed when I compare KnowledgeBase/guidelines betwen my beloved emc² PowerLink and emc² s support in general compared to poor 3par documentation. From my point of view there are worlds between.
But anyway... we have to live with the descision and try to make the best of it.

Joerg

[hairyfish]

Sorry I can't help, but I'm in a similar position. The 3PAR kit looks good, but trying to find help is proving very difficult. HP doco is next to useless, so far a handful of youtube videos is all I've been able to find

[bigiron]

do you have a login to https://connex.3pardata.com/docs/docs_main.php

there are some docs there but you're right, it's not as rich compare to other tech vendors such as EMC, Cisco, Citrix, etc.

We have a mix of thin and full provisioned VVs exported to an oracle DB. We learned that we're not really getting any benefit in making DB VVs thin because of our usage pattern, the thin VVs stays FAT. Keep in mind that converting from thin to full or vice-versa requires some downtime. And full to thin conversion requires "Thin Conversion" license.

3PAR recommends spreading everything to all spindles of the same type (FC or NL), this forms a CPG. I think you should watch this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4QyaPLC ... re=related to understand the benefits of wide stripping, micro raids, and CPGs.