Solaris

I'm currently planning to improve my skills on sun disk array and deciding whether to go with sun disk array A5200 or A1000. I have found a few good systems with decent price but still can't seem to find out which one to choose. For the host system, I have 1 ultra 5 and 1 e220r system. I will most likely buy a fiber card and will install it on 220 box.

Please help me find out which array will be best suitable for the beginner and what are the best scenarios to use such as backup server, db server, nfs/zfs server..

I would also like to know which one would require more maintenance and prone to crash and hardware (battery/ram?) intensive as I would not want to fix and spend more money during my first try and would only like to focus on the setups and configurations.

Thank you

pt

these are old (end of life) products and they are totaly different... the a1000 is a hardware raid and the a5200 is a jbod system.
the software to configure the a1000 raid (rm 6.xx) is needed and i don't think there is work in progress on this one... haven't seen it for years in the field!

so depending on what you trying to learn they both can be a good or a bad choice...

Hi,
I've used both in the past and the 5200 is the better of the two options in my opinion. I think the A1000 went EOL a little before the 5200 too.

You can get 12 disks in an A1000 but 22 in a 5200 tray.

The A1000 would require a scsi connection and Raid Manager software which went end of life at version 6.22.1 (I think) and finding a copy may be difficult. The A1000 also isn't a supported option with Solaris 10 where as the 5200 does support Solaris 10 so its at least got some life left in in with the current version of Solaris. Kind in mind that the 5200 will have to be connected via Fibre to the system.

The 5200 has a nice touch screeen display on the front for managment such as spinning disks up and down which is easy to use and I know Sun still use a combination of E220 and A5200's for their ZFS training classes in the uk but you didnt hear that from me

Best of luck and have fun learning with whichever option you choose.

Thanks for the help. As both of you suggested, A5200 will be the better option. I will still have to hunt down for the hardware in running condition and also the fibre card.

As I was looking around after the post, I have also found out another hardware raid Sun T3 array and the seller mentioned they required a new battery. Have you guys every had a chance to work with that model and also had any ideas on pros and cons with a5200/a1000?

Cheers and thank you again.

Hi

Yes I've worked with the T3's before, used them in an Oracle Veritas Cluster at the time. Hardware RAID if I remember correctly but we only had a pair of them. We had a bad experience with it due to bad firmware which meant we lost one of the RAID 5 sets on it and had to recover from tape - not a very nice thing to happen.

All was ok with it once the firmware was updated but never had any confidence in it after that although it ran perfectly for 18 months after that before we replaced it.

Quite a bit newer than the other two bits of kit you've seen, still EOL but Sun have stated they will support it till 2011 if you pay them so spares should be around till then I would have thought.

I'd say its quite a bit more complicated than the A1000 or 5200 to set up but there should be plenty of documentation around if needed.

I'm not saying the T3 is a bad bit of kit, just my experience with it was one best forgotten.

I just got myself an a5200 disk array with qlogic HBA card and starting to configure it now.