[WinMac] Re: Using NT for a MacFile server, newer tech

Daniel L. Schwartz(expresso[at]snip.net)
Tue, 21 Sep 1999 23:41:40 -0400

        OK, here goes... I'll reply inline...

At 04:49 PM 9/21/99 -0400, you wrote:
>
>Dan,
>
>OK, I'll bite. Let's get geeky! :-)
>
>My raid controller is LVD-LVD straight through - I purchased this
>particular controller mainly for cable length, not speed. You of course
>have to stick LVD-PCI controllers in your macs (adding some expense, but
>definitely *not* a hack).

        You might as well have shot the wad and gone to Fibre Channel (FC-AL) SAN
- Especially if you have large files. FC-AL extends the SCSI specifications
to multiple computers.

        Yes, external RAID devices with SCSI-SCSI adapters will work; and in your
case fill your 100Base-TX pipeline. But, if it's a small shop it's
beneficial to use the server as a combo server/workstation, and then
performance will indeed suffer. This is one of the nice things about NT - I
have three small customers who use combo NT machines in just this way. In
fact, two of the three are used for photo editing and retouching with
Photoshop, and also as file servers for their Mac workstations. Here, they
need the disk speed for 200 MB photoshop files as well as "filling the wire."

>We get very speedy performance out of our RAID
>tower. Certainly enough to pretty much fill up the 100mb pipes on the two
>servers simultaneously. When I say *pretty much* I mean around 8-9mb/sec.
>I've never benched the RAID disk I/O but, well...it's gotta be at least
>20mb/sec. And before you yell "Cache!", both these servers run 96mb and
>they have FMP server and Retrospect running too. ASIP doesn't get too much
>memory to play with. I hammer mac servers with LanTest and/or Pounder and
>if they fill the pipes I don't worry about it too much more.

        As I was quoted in The Register...

                Buy more RAM...
                        It's cheaper than therapy!

>OK granted, if I had the ability to run multi-port ethernet or gig cards in
>the Mac servers, I might pay more attention to disk I/O. But we're not
>nearly there yet.

        Just wait... You'll get there quicker than you'll realize! :)

>I'm not sure what you mean about NT server and workstation RAID's being
>transportable - I mean, yeah that's true.

        OK, Disk Administrator for NT/W will create RAID 0 (striping), RAID 1
(mirroring), and spanning volumes. NT/Server will create RAID 1 and RAID 5
(Striping with distributed parity) and spanning volumes.

        The trick is to load both NT/S *AND* NT/W if you want to play games, i.e.
if you want a server that has RAID 0 volumes, or a workstation that has
RAID 5 volumes.

>AFAIK, you can take a SoftRaid
>(included with ASIP BTW) RAID and move it to any mac you want, server or
>workstation too.

        Yes, I was a beta tester for SoftRAID 1.5. And, version 1.1 was repackaged
with AppleShare Server 4.1. BUT, SoftRAID is not quite transportable to any
Mac: It's PowerPC native, and will not transfer back to a 68040 Mac... Been
there, done that. (I still like to use the Quadra 840AV with AppleShare
Server 4.0.2 as a small server, because the disk I/O is pretty good.)

>Matter of fact, my two 9650's are nothing more than power
>supplies with memory, an Asante 100mb card, an Adaptec card and a fan.
>They boot and operate *entirely* off the RAID (again, from separate
>partitions of course). I can run my ASIP servers from *any* PCI mac with
>two empty slots.

        I don't normally recommend booting from an array, but in your case it's
probably not that bad. Instead, I normally use a small (~1 - 2 gig) HDD
dedicated for the task, with two partitions each with their own OS
instance. For NT, the Boot Manager (BOOT.INI) handles the switching; while
for the Mac I use Silverlining's Silver Volumes D/A to mount & hide the
spare volume. On the Mac, I use a smaller "Emergency" partition (now
bloated up to about 100 MB) with a minimal OS, Norton Utilities,
Disinfectant, and Worm Food.

>Just a side note about newer: we have about 40 of their 6100 G3 cards.
>Never a problem. Got my last three of them last week. These three were
>all DOA. Little cap pak was busted off the board on all of them! My
>MicroWarehouse salesdude tells me they're having quite the little cash
>crunch. He also said they've been seeing lots of returns of their boards
>lately. Hmm. I finally fixed my 9650 server problems with much tweaking,
>removing of extensions, etc.

        Thanks for the heads-up on Newer: They already went through bankruptcy
once when RAM prices tumbled in 1995-96.

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