Alignment for Linux

take a look at this solution.

emc143003

Interesting .. it's easier to have answers from a customer

This is interesting, as there seems to be a great deal of contradiction on this.
It looks like from primus this needs to be done for any Intel based Linux installations, but I guess the big questions are:

1) Does this also apply to IA64 Architecture?
2) Will this also be the case for a Symmetrix?

Thanks for the responses so far

Also, just for refrence, to do an alignment on Linux would I use the fdisk command like this?

fdisk /dev/emcpowerah

and answer the questions from there.

Yes it's fdisk:

fdisk /dev/emcpower*
x # expert mode
b # adjust starting block number
1 # choose partition 1
128 # set to 128, our stripe element size
w # write the new partition

It looks like an issue with the default "partitioning" scheme that fdisk uses. I think that if you have an fdisk command (i.e. if you access the disks via BIOS) you need to use fdisk to align the partition with the tracks of your storage. Please note that fdisk can be used only BEFORE formatting the partitions. Take great care while installing your server.

Either symm or DMX require this alignment since both have 32k tracks and the bios creates a "gap" in the first track that render the whole disk "unaligned" in either 32K or 64K tracks worlds, AFAIK. That's why we suggest to align the partitions on a 128K boundary. This will fit symms, dmx and clariions

I'm neither a linux guru nor an Intel/BIOS guru ...

-s-