My world of Unix and Storage

We came across a weird problem in Nagios, after it was working for almost an year. Searched the web, but didn't got any head way for the problem. Every body were complaining about the issue but the resolution were not clear. I started looking the source code, and found the function in util.c, there were different error conditions but got a hint what the problem could be. So, all set i started the nagios service and ran strace against the pid. Soon after about 40 seconds, it vanished. Forgot to mention we were running nagios on RHEL 5.5 32 bit linux. I checked the various options for the nagios process. There is one option for running it in the foreground. The syntax check was fine. As soon, it was started on the foreground, it dumped with the error message "File limit ....". Couldn't remember the exact output. There are 2 files which could be the problem, one is nagios.log or nagios.debug. Both were OK. Their is another file perfcheck.pipe or perfmon.pipe (something o...

The thought process has gone into the management of moving the production database from Solaris running on Oracle M8000 to IBM AIX. The initial cost of providing the clustered solution and the DR is coming to $2.5 million. Oracle were taking us for a ride with the discounts on M8000. The 50% agressive discount offering on M8000 comes at the same cost of M8000 that we bought last year. Along with the Veritas storage foundation and the support cost, its too expensive as a solution. We have the quotes from IBM for their p750, however we feel this is not an apples to apple comparison as the p750 lacks the RAS features. Th better would be the comparison with p595 or p785. We have to get the POC done and get the actual working configuration. Its a long way to go, since our aplication compatibility is yet to be established with AIX 6.1. Also, we are in the process of moving from 32 bit progress database to OpenEdge 64 bit. The dynamics will change with respect to cpu and memory utilization on...

A tough task is in my hands to decide between the 3 different storage vendors for our storage requirement. We have been EMC customers for last 10 yrs, but now would like go around and see what others are offering. The requirement is not huge ~260 Tb storage and ~80000 IOPS, which I believe can be meet by any mid-tier storage offering. We have VNX7500 from EMC with FAST and FAST-vp loaded with SSD's and 48GB ram (shared) and single socket CPU (Quad core) and 600 GB of SSD as L2 cache blah blah. The backend is SAS, that is a shift from CX line where we have FC. This also means we cannot re-use the existing hardware from EMC. The IOPS pattern hovers between 8000 to 40000 currently and will soon scale upto 80000 IOPS. Hitachi has a offering AMS2500, which is also SAS with 32 GB cache and Active/Active controller (difference from EMC). The maintenance cost is attractive almost 6-8% of the array cost. Hitachi also does a buy back. IBM has V7000, still to get some input on this. Will upda...