Need info. Please help.
About 6 months ago I was asked to investigate Fibre Channel as a solution to our build lab problems. After some very brief investigation I realized that is was not a viable option (too few players and too expensive). Well, both of those things have changed and I now realize I have a bugdet.
Bottom line is that we have a build lab with close to 80 machines in them in various stages of building, testing, or copying files.
A typical scenario is:
1. sync local files to master server (2 hours)
2. build everything (10-12 hours)
3. run tests
3a. copy built files to other machines (30-45 minutes)
3b. run suites
4. copy files to drop machine (3 hours)
Everything above should be on a 100Mb Ethernet system.
Questions:
Step 1 - is difficult to improve because the build lab has no control over the master server. However, is it worthwhile to have a mirror image locally? On a FC drive?
Step 2 - we build on a 128MB dual pentium system. (Should be powerful enough.) Would replacing the SCSI drive with a FC drive be helpful? Even though the transfer rate might be faster I heard that the data can only be read so fast from the drive and hence the extra transfer speed is not necessary. Thoughts?
Step 3a - would like to copy the files in 5 minutes or less.
Step 3b - we run tests suites ranging from 4 minutes to 6 hours depending on the type of drop we want to make. A lot of this is disk access but there is not much to do here.
Step 4 - this is one we would like to work on. Even though the build is now successful and all the suites pass, users cannot get to it until it is copied to a drop machine. Copying all the files necessary takes roughly 3 hours. Several questions come to mind. Do we need to have an FC storage device on both systems or can one be FC and the other SCSI? Do we need an FC switch or can we do peer-to-peer?
For an evaluation system we would like to have one machine build with an FC drive (fix build time) and be able to do peer-to-peer to drop the files (fix drop time). Assuming that works we would seriously consider converting the entire lab to use Fibre Channel. Anyone have any thoughts on all this?
I am a software guy and not a hardware guy so I am not sure what is needed to improve the build process. However, after asking all of the above questions I now understand why Ancor might be having such a hard time making sales. The above solutions require FC storage, FC switches, hubs(?), adapters(?), etc. I would like to have one source where I can go ask all of my questions and get a good answer for what the solution should be. Currently, I believe no one in the FC arena offers such a service. Instead, I am forced to come here or to some other such source to get my answers. Because of this I doubt that we will implement Fibre Channel in any capacity.
Imagine on the otherhand that I make one call to a sales person at Ancor and he/she tells me exactly what I need to improve my performance by 50%? I have the budget for it, I just need the answers.
Anyway, this has been quite a long post. If anyone has any suggestions on how to get started on this, please help. Also, if anyone has any good contacts, at Ancor or any other company, I would like to hear about them.
If your answers are general, please post them here as I am sure others would like to know how to implement Fibre Channel in the real world. If they are more specific, please send them to edschult@microsoft.com. If I get enough interesting replies I will post a compilation on this board.
Good luck to all in 98. Hope Ancor finally gets the notice it deserves.
Ed Schultz |
