Cox Crow

Tools for the Enterprise SysAdmin

Just because it needs to be mentioned again, slaughter those daemons in an more engaging environment.

5:41:09 PM # Google It!
categories: System Administration

Biggus Diskus

What's so funny? I've a fwend in Wome named Biggus Dickus.

While I sat in a training session on the EMC Symmetrix this morning, I thought some tangential thoughts about storage allocation. Disks used to come in smaller sizes. Now they're like Starbucks' cups: Big, Bigger, and Biggest.

In configuring small disks, you had to give a lot of thought to capacity planning, and to how you would allocate the filesystems in order to maximize not only capacity but also performance.

For example, for a server, you might want three logical volumes, one for each of the operating system, swap space, and data. Then, for fault tolerance you might construct the OS volume out of a pair of mirrored physical disks, and the data volume out of a mirrored stripe-set, to balance fault-tolerance and performance. And another mirrored pair for swap. And then there's the spare.

But do we really want a separate volume for swap when we have to go out of our way to find a small disk? Isolating it from the OS will improve performance, but it feels like waste.

The other problem is that 1U hosts are adequate for most applications, but generally do not contain enough disk to allocate in this manner, so you put everything in multiple filesystems on one or two volumes. Or just don't bother — or buy more expensive hardware.

Somewhat related: Capacity Planning and You have exceeded the storage limit on your mailbox.

3:16:06 PM # Google It!
categories: System Administration