Server configuration troubles

[[AK]Beaker]

Ok I sit in an I.t./I.s. Meeting that is often over my head recently they are having problems configuring a server for a database test. Specifically the drivers are having issues with the multipathing of the San disks with red hat Linux. I don't know what most of those words mean, all I know is that at this point it has held up testing of a new database for information that I want. The newest solution was to try veritas drivers (again no clue what this means) but I am asking all you guys have y'all run into multipathing issues and what was the solution you implemented.

[[AK]The Beast]

We're just getting into the SAN world here at my work, but let me see if I can help you out with a bit of the terminology. I don't know what your knowledge level is, so forgive me if I'm oversimplifying or overexplaining the obvious:

SAN=Storage Area Network. Basically, one or more boxes that look like a computer but are, basically, just a pile of hard drives for other computers to connect to and use over a network (rather than full-fledged computers themselves).

Multipath=one computer having two or more separate network connections to the aforementioned pile of hard drives. This lets your servers access their storage faster when things are good, and if one connection goes down, the other one is still there, so the server can still see its storage.

Red Hat=one "brand" of Linux, the server's operating system.

Driver=how the operating system talks to the hardware (in this case, the network cards). Without the right drivers for the server's network cards, multipath isn't available to talk to the SAN. Veritas is a software company that is probably providing the drivers your IT folks are using.

So it sounds like the server can't contact its storage (which is where your database probably is or needs to be), and it also sounds like your IT folks think the drivers are to blame. They're trying a new set of drivers, which sounds like a logical "next step" to me.

We made sure to purchase a good support contract with our SAN and the servers connected to it, and we're pretty quick to phone up their help line for help with things like multipathing problems. We're pretty much an exclusively Windows shop, so I can't give you specific advice for your Linux server.

[[AK]Bojan]

Dont worry Pharm you dont need to know all that stuff. Just tell them... "Make it happen!"

[[AK]Beaker]

I've been trying "make it happen" because in a matter of months I'm going to be out of space!

We've tried technical support unfortunately IBM says it's Red Hat and Red Hat says it's hardware! I just wondered if anyone had experienced these issues and how they fixed them.