[Info-vax] HP SAN switch question

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-02-18 08:55:10 +0000, Hans Vlems said:

> Ha, may I infer from that last sentence that you are not a fan of FC 
> technology Hoff?

FC works, for what it does.   it can work well.   It's that most 
OpenVMS FC SAN gear is old and slow and hot and variously crufty.

Then there is the spectacularly problematic nature of the typical FC 
SAN management interface.   But I'm being polite.

As for speed, the OpenVMS FC HBA support and the rotating rust storage 
bas all badly fallen off the performance curve.

For FC, 16 Gb HBAs are presently the upper limit.   HPE only supports 8 
Gb FC HBAs with OpenVMS too, when last I checked.  No published support 
for the SN1000Q/B9F24A/B9F24A, etc.   (Not that anybody can find 
anything at the HPE web site these days, either.)    That's in 
comparison to 40 GbE NICs.

Yeah, FC has a lower bit error rate which does make up for (some) of 
the speed differential.   But 40 GbE NICs are readily available for 
those that need the bandwidth.

Actually keeping a fast NIC busy won't be easy for an operating system, 
either — https://lwn.net/Articles/629155/  — nor is OpenVMS 
particularly known for its I/O stack performance.

As for recent 3PAR FC storage — which you won't find in many OpenVMS 
configurations, though at least some of the 3PAR gear is supported with 
OpenVMS — there's the low-end 3PAR 8000 series with 24 x 16 Gb FC 
ports.   Which are actually very fast arrays.  But you need to use lots 
of FC ports to get there.   And OpenVMS can only sip on that tsunami of 
data through its 8 Gb FC HBA soda straw, AFAIK.

So... What FC gear you usually see with OpenVMS tends to be old and slow and...

> Now that I've got a job again I am more willing to spend money on an OS 
> X experiment. Fedora also works well for me, but the sheer volume of 
> updates every couple of days is distracting. It's good to see that the 
> platform is actively supported but the footprint increases dramatically.

Fedora is a bleeding-edge distro.   Switching to an LTS distro will 
greatly reduce the churn.


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