[SunHELP] How Do I......

[Michael A. Turner]

> OK.  There are several questions you need to ask yourself about this.
> Which is most important to you -- space, speed, or redundancy? Can you
> spare any of that 144GB? Is cost the only thing stopping you 
> from using
> RAID?

	I can spare as much as I need, we are moving the oracle databse on
this machine from a 15 GB HD to this machine with 6 35 GB drives (2 are in
the sunfire) be nice to keep at least 70 GB though. We want redundancy more
than anything, data safety is key. and yes, cost is the big issue with us
going to raid, pluss my irritation at teh fact that after I start setting up
the machine they spec'd to not have raid, they want raid now.
 
> Once you've thought about those, you're now ready to remember that
> Solaris ships with very good software RAID tools (there's even a
> graphical manager for them, if you're willing to endure the 
> horror that 
> is CDE), and ask yourself whether you want to:
>    (A) just join the disks end-to-end into one big logical disk?
>    (B) distribute data across all four disks in parallel?
> or (C) set up RAID5 across the four disks?

	The preference order here is c , then b, then a. Until your post I
was simply hoping to get A out of the deal. What graphical interface are you
referring to? I dug around and came up empty.


> (C) is not as fast as a plain stripe due to the overhead of the parity
> calculations, but gives you the benefit of redundancy.  You 
> can survive
> the failure of any single disk without loss of data or 
> performance, but
> one full disk's worth of space* (out of however many disks you use) is
> used for parity, so your working data set would be 108GB instead of
> 144GB.  If you wanted to do it this way, you would do this:
> 
> metainit d10 -r c1t1d0s0 c1t2d0s0 c1t3d0s0 c1t4d0s0 -i 128k
> 
> * A single disk's worth of space, but not a single disk -- parity data
>   is distributed across all of the disks.
> 
> 
> Before you can do any of these, you first need to create 
> metadbs on your
> boot devices.  I suggest starting out by reading the man pages for
> metadb, metainit, and everything they refer you to.
>

	Were do I get metadb and metainit from? I checked the machine and
came up with nothing in man for either of these commands. Find / | grep
meta* brought me no love either. This machine came with solaris 8 12/02
installed. I have added the recomended patches to it and the patches to make
the Ultra Scsi controller work. No other software has been added. 
> 
> 
> -- 
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