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GS1280 cutover

Today the AlphaServer GS1280s replaced the GS160s that have been the data warehouse cluster for the last couple of years.

We encountered two problems, but neither of them were showstoppers.

The first was that noone had remembered the the EMC frames needed to know the WWIDs of the new fibrechannel adapters. I was in the process of moving the host ports from the development zone to the production zone when this amazing oversight hit me. We called one of the storage guys and they were kind enough to come in and correct the issue.

The second was when we booted up the GS1280s, Rdb failed to start with an error indicating that the version of the CPU was unsupported. This is the first time I've ever seen a product that has a version "ceiling" on it. Interestingly, the help for the compiler qualifier says that the code generated is for "EV56 and above". Now, I thought EV7 was "above", but apparently not? The Rdb engine must be performing an explicit test.

After consulting with management on this one, we performed an upgrade of Rdb. We were pretty confident that this would go in fine as we had already done it on three other major clusters, and had been planning it for the following week anyway.

Everything went well, and we then got a successful checkout from the applications teams.

I'm going to be interested to see how much of a performance increase we get...