Thanks to everyone for your input on this issue.  Most of the solutions are
similar to Terry's, although he is the first who said that HP and EMC
actually worked together to help.

I think that our scenario is very close to Terry's and that with LOT's of
fore thought we can manage the i/o beast.

Carl

-----Original Message-----
From: Terry Warns [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, April 10, 2000 7:43 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: EMC on HP3k question


I have put together various EMC configurations for both test and production
machines.  In many cases we needed to put more than 15 EMC logical drives on
a controller.  We spent considerable time in designing our user volume sets.
On an Amisys machine for instance, we had System Volume, Application Volume,
and a Backup Volume.  We estimated the need for each.

Then we started spreading the volumes across the controllers.  For instance
we may have chosen 16GB for our System Volume Set, so we put 1 4 GB logical
drive on 4 controllers.  Then we may have had 180GB Application set, where
we would spread the 10 18GB drives over the 10 controllers.  Then we may
have had 90GB Backup Volume and spread them over the controllers.  We also
tried to isolate LDEV 1 as much as possible to maximize its IO throughput.
We mixed and matched user volume sets with controllers.

The result was as expected, disk IO throughput soared.  We spent a full day
with EMC on our configuration and a full day with our HP CE's on our
configuration.  With lots of white board.  We also spent a half day
reviewing our proposed configuration and  another full day on our migration
plan.

--
Terry Warns
OakSoft Consulting


Carl McNamee <[log in to unmask]> wrote in message
news:F4B1826B1A21D211AEC5006008207AF404F885E5@dogbert.csillc.com...
> This is a cross post from the EMC list server:
>
> A bit of back ground and a summary of our problem. We have a 3700 frame
that
> is about 60% full of 23GB drives. The drives are split into 4.6GB logical
> partitions. We assigned drives to the controllers based on HP's
> recommendation of no more than 8-10 drives for performance since we have
> some very i/o intensive applications.
> My problem is that all 32 controllers all "full", e.g. have 8-10 drives
> assigned, but the emc box is only half full of drives. What I am
interested
> in is how many drives you have assigned to each controller?
> HP's theory on the 8-10 drives deals with an optimal number of spindles,
if
> I'm not mistaken. Since a logical emc drive does not necessarily equate to
a
> spindle we are thinking about stringing the drives out 15-20 per
controller
> so that we can fill the frame with drives. In our theory we would just
need
> to ensure that we did not exceed the capacity of the f/w scsi channel
during
> peak processing. I think that this can be done by arranging the drives so
> that we have a good mix of low use drives and high use drives on each
> controller.
> Any thoughts or comments? Feel free to poke holes in this!
> Carl McNamee
> Systems Administrator
> Billing Concepts
>