[dered]

Hi,

We recently invested in our infrastructure buying a blade center H chassis and DS 4700 SAN with fiber San switches.We use only 4 blades at the moment and have 10 remaining.

Now, we have a new core app implementationn

We are in the design stage of our project. IBM has recommended to us a solution to run our Oracle Database EE and Oracle AS EE using a P550 and P520. Both machines are 4 core 4.2 ghz. Reason behind P550 is apparently expansion for the future.( i cant post diagrams till i have 10 posts) The vio server will be installed on 2 lapar's on both servers for failover.



Anyways, i want to use js22 blades for my solution. Ibm says the lack of more than 1 FC channel expansion per blade might create a bottleneck in the future and that for the P550 and P520 we can add more FC's.

Here is their opinion

"
1- IBM p550 and P520 Server solution give more flexibility in all hardware components, CPUs, Memory, PCI adapters, internal disk etc.

2- The limitation of I/O adapters on Blade Servers can result in:

a. No option to increase the bandwidth to disk or tape device, may result in purchase of new hardware (other than Blade)
b. Recommanded in SAN enviornment is to have seperate FC adapters for tape and disk workload, this is not possible in case of Blade server with single dual ported adapter.
c. Consolidated proposal with Logical partitioning (LPARs) will share workload through single FC and Ethernet adapter.
d. Separate physical VLAN connection limitation because of single adapters, maybe required by CFC in future to separate DMZ, Secured and public zones.

3- Booting from SAN, as recommanded by IBM, requries an internal Ethernet Switch on Blade Chassis, resulting in additional cost.

4- Number of physical servers are more in blade option, but the utilization of each server is low.

5- Increased number of physical servers will increase the operating system and clustering software cost. Implementation charges will be higher on this option. "


What is the general opinion on this? Can anyone help?

[dered]

I can provide the logical diagrams but i need atleast 5 posts.

So please bear with me

Thanks for taking the time tho

[ross.mather]

My queries in this case is how you are going to back up your environment? recommendation 2b is key here.

What is your required availability? 24/7 or something less?

You already have the blades so saving money isn't the issue in Virtualising new servers so I would discount point 4, and to an extent point 1.

The only other issue is one of expansion later on. What woulf be the cost to your buisness of doing a reengineer of your application when you need more capacity?

[dered]

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

The plan is to host Oracle DB on the system and have a tape library backup using tivoli. (can u suggest anything else)

We would prefer 24/7 but an hour or two downtime is within parameters.

We dont expect great expansion for the next 5 years. If it is a necissity then we would re-engineer the whole system. Cost no problem. P7?? ;-)

Any suggestions??

[ross.mather]

If you want 24/7 you'll need to use Tivoli Data Protection for Oracle which means you'd need a second fibre card on your Oracle server, to write directly to tape.

From what you've said I'd consider putting my Oracle DB server on a single bigger box and then putting the app serevrs on the blades. You can also put your TSM server on the bigger box so that you have enough Fibre Cards for everything (or do you have a TSm setup already?).

In the end its the backup strategy together with the availability requirements of your Database that will dicate which route you should follow. The IBm recommendations will be a better fit for growing your organisation and giving you close on 24/7 availability - but using the blades will be cheaper (at least in the short term). Don't forget blades are also really good development and test servers....

just my 2 [pence|cents|eurocents] worth.