In my original note, I was using the example given in class (which had multiple controllers). I know the difference between shelves and controllers. I just thought that the 10 percent performance hit, when crossing controllers would be useful information, I should have left it out.
The main point was that there is no way to tell the filer to build on a specific spare. And the only way, according to the NetApp class that I took, (without shutting down and shuffling drives), is to replace the failed drive, and remove all of the spares, including the one that the array rebuilt on. Without any spares in the system, the array will rebuild on the new drive.
Sam Schorr wrote:
Douglas,
I think you are confusing "adapter" with "disk shelf". Unless you have 2 FCAL adapters in your filer, and have connected each shelf to its own adapter, you are not spanning adapters and thus not violating what the manual says. I have many filers with their full complement of disk shelves connecting to the 1 FCAL adapter on the filer head. I have RAID groups that span shelves as will happen when disk spare out. There is no performance penalty in this scenario.
Sam Schorr Homestead.com ph: (650) 549-3152 fax: (650) 364-7329 sschorr@homestead-inc.com http://www.homestead.com
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-----Original Message----- From: Douglas Ritschel [mailto:Douglas.Ritschel@fnc.fujitsu.com] Sent: Monday, July 10, 2000 12:20 PM To: Bruce Sterling Woodcock Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: volume/shelf containment
This is what the book says:
"-Write performance will suffer when a RAID group spans more than one FC-AL or SCSI adapter. -Keep all drives assigned to a RAID group on the same adapter whenever posible. -There is an approximate 10% decrease in write performance when the filer attempts to write to a RAID group spanning two adapters. This is due to inherent limitations in the PCI bus."
Bruce Sterling Woodcock wrote:
Unless I misunderstand some of the bus issues involved, the 10% performance hit would only occur on writes, and since writes are grouped and it is unlikely that you are writing to the drives ever second, you'll never notice it.
Reads come off individual disks as needed, so it doesn't matter which controller they are on. (I guess if you needed to read a whole stripe at once there's a potential hit, but I'm not sure that necessary.) The point is, with two volumes you're using both controllers anyway.
Bruce
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