Home >> White Papers >> FlashDisk Installation Tips

FlashDisk Installation Tips

Prepare for Success
Successful installation is no accident. It happens by choosing the best equipment for the job and by preparing for successful installation, operation and maintenance. “Plug and play” sometimes means plug it in and it immediately plays and sometimes means plug it in and play and play until it works. The truth is, as always, somewhere in between. By reviewing the following checklist, you can be assured that you have done as much as you can to ensure the success of your server storage installation.

Pre-installation Checklist
Configuration - Choose the configuration that meets your performance, storage, availability, and serviceability needs by consulting with your sales engineer. Stick with standard configurations for best price/performance and ease of serviceability unless your requirements dictate otherwise. Ask the difficult questions before buying anything. The higher the availability requirements, the more redundancy and component removability you require. Consider redundancy for disk channels, host buses, interface cards and even servers in addition to the disk drives and internal disk array components.

Backup

Ensure that your backup device and procedure are adequate to handle the increased storage in the time available.

Power

Ensure clean power and UPS protection. Add cache battery backup option for added data protection.

Interference

Check for sources of electromagnetic interference such as banks of modems on web servers.

Load

Is the system totally loaded already? Will the addition of one more device, especially a high performance RAID array, push the load limit over the edge?

SCSI Interface

Is the interface fast enough to avoid bottlenecking the new high performance equipment?

Service

Decide who is going to perform remedial service. Do you need 24x7 service availability? On-site third party service? Will you train your people?

Key phone numbers

Post 800 Hotline numbers in conspicuous places. Post beeper number and perhaps home phone numbers of key internal personnel. Prepare pocket summaries with this information for key people to keep handy.

Spare parts

Are advance replacement parts supplied overnight sufficient or do you need on-site spare parts?

Remote alarms

Would you benefit if your system were programmed to “cry for help” by automatically dialing designated pagers with an optional alarm?

Remote diagnostics

With an optional modem, you can enable your system to receive remote diagnostic calls. Temporary system passwords can be provided for use only when the service is needed.

Performance benchmark

Naturally you will be curious to test how much faster everything runs with new high performance storage. Time your longest batch jobs and measure client response to lengthy transactions before and after installation. Call us with the benchmark information to see if you are getting the performance you paid for - or simply to share the excitement of any productivity increase you receive.

Capacity assessment

Based upon performance benchmarks, you can make a reasonable estimate of how many users you can support on the existing server before you need to add another one

During Installation

Schedule downtime

Make sure that there will be time enough to properly install the system. Allow plenty of time and anticipate that it will take longer than expected - Murphy is ever present.

Test period

The more critical the application, the longer the shake out period should be. Several days to several weeks of running diagnostics, exercisers and representative applications is a reasonable precaution to take before committing your entire enterprise to a new piece of equipment - including RAID arrays.

Training

Make sure one or preferably two or more people are trained on the system. Training includes setting up RAID arrays, swapping components, rebuilding arrays, simulating failures and, most importantly, practicing what to do in the event of actual failures.

After Installation

Data protection

RAID is not different than any other storage device when it comes to protection from viruses and accidental or deliberate deletions. Implement the same file protection and record locking strategies you would use on a non-RAID system.

Data recovery

Database and transaction processing systems are often implemented on RAID systems. If yesterday's backup is too old to be a useful data recovery system, make sure you have the ability to roll the database forward in time with journal files or similar capabilities. Store journal files on a separate physical device from your primary database. No system is perfect, not even RAID systems. You still need to protect your data as you would with any storage device.

Data backup

Typically, RAID systems significantly increase your total storage capacity. Make sure you do a complete backup frequently and incremental backups at least daily. Test data restoration periodically to ensure that you remember how to do it and to ensure proper operation of the tape system.

Data security

Make extra backups and keep copies off site.

Upgrades

Certainly there are other improvements on your agenda. You should implement one major change at a time so that problems are easy to identify and correct if you are upgrading an existing server. You wouldn't want to upgrade the operating system and the application while also installing new storage and backup. If you need to make all these changes and want to avoid sequential disruptions, build an entire new server and then test it intensively before deploying. Keep the old server as a backup until the new one is proven.

Communication

Stay in touch with your service provider. The person will be familiar with your installation and your capabilities when you need help and will be better prepared when the time comes.

contact us | site map | privacy
copyright © 2007 by Winchester Systems