[Info-vax] VSI VMS Community License Program - PAKS Arrived today

[John H. Reinhardt]

On 8/13/2020 12:33 PM, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <rh3mls$4ko$1 at dont-email.me>, "John H. Reinhardt"
> <johnhreinhardt at thereinhardts.org> writes:
> 
>>> This lack of volume shadowing PAKS is really a bad deal.  I'm
>>> dissapointed.  I was pretty excited to finally upgrade.  I just work
>>> on porting various opensource packages in my spare time for fun,
>>> exploring OpenVMS administration tasks, and other silly constructed
>>> problems.  But I'm not going to put any time into a system that
>>> doesn't have mirrored system drives, and disk mirroring for backups.
> 
> The questions are if there is a real problem with people abusing the
> hobbyist licenses for commercial use and if there will be no clustering
> in the community license in the long term whether a clustering license
> would be affordable for the average hobbyist.  I have no problem paying
> a reasonable fee.
> 
>> I agree with you.  With that said volume shadowing is available on the
>> Alpha platform which is where most Hobbyists will be.
> 
> And, from the looks of it, will stay, at least those who bought some
> commercial licenses back in the day.  :-|
> 
>> When it comes to Integrity there is the option of using an HP Smart
>> Array card which has hardware RAID-0, 1, 5 and JBOD.  There is thee P600
>> card which works in Integrity systems with PCI-X busses and SATA drives.
>>   Or the P410 which is PCI-E and SATA.  For the likes of the RX2600 and
>> ZX6000 with PCI-X and SCSI there are the Smart Array 5300 and 6400
>> series.  These cards are relatively cheap on EBay.  I bought two P410
>> cards for $13 and a 1GB flash backed cache for one was another $12.  The
>> older SA6400 cards are creeping up in price but still can be had for
>> under $50 usually.
> 
> OK, it protects against a physical disk failing, but other than that,
> not much to do with HBVS.
> 

True.  Hardware RAID gets you disk mirroring within each server, but if you want volume shadowing across MSCP disks and Clusters (which you can't do either on Itanium) then you are out of luck.

-- 
John H. Reinhardt