Re: Network Appliance and Oracle -- anyone using it?

Walt,

I've been using them for about 20 months. I love 'em! I haven't had a single blip in production from them and we've put everything but archived log files on them (of course you want to mirror control and redo logs elsewhere too).

When we were testing with our first F720, we got about a 30% increase in speed with a Oracle 7.2.2 On Solaris 2.6 over the same configuration running on 4 local drives (FW SCSI) -- and that was via a single ethernet that was the same LAN segment that all the office access was on. Our production configuration is three 100BaseT connections, the office LAN for administrative/backup stuff and two exclusive segments going through a switch to a the servers. We do some load balancing between the segments by changing mount points on our OFA (mostly) structure.

The performance is good, and we have the price/stability advantages of a RAID 5 without the write penalty (which is nullified by the Write Anywhere File Layout WAFL). The snapshot facility makes cold backups, clones, standby database maintenance, etc. a breeze. The network connection makes moving DB's around other local servers a mere task of mount points. The NetApps gave me my weekends back.

Of course we've had some HW failures. One of the dual power supplies failed and they replaced both because of the failure rate on one manufacturing batch. A couple of the Seagate drives have failed but the parity and spares kept everything ticking with no noticable performance change. All of those were hot swapped out.

In a test situation one of our SA's insisted on mounting one with NFS3 TCP instead of the NFS2 UDP that was recommended in the Oracle tips from NetApp. That configuration gave us periodic lockups on the TCP ports we went back to the recommended configuration and haven't had a problem since.

Our configurations are simple -- a single F720 at each of our three physical locations so we haven't used any of their more complex clustering arrangements.

-rje

WW> Is anyone using, or has anyone used, Oracle running on a Network Appliance?  

WW> Evidently Network Appliance is certified by Oracle to run NFS-mounted
WW> datafiles, redo logs, etc. on their filers (Network Appliance Servers) and
WW> have a number of failover, backup, and clustering solutions. They are
WW> inexpensive compared to the solution handed to us by EMC, so we're taking a
WW> close look at what Network Appliance has to offer. We're currently using'em
WW> as our NFS file servers only.
 

WW> Any adulations, pot shots, or snide remarks will be welcomed warmly.  

WW> Thanks, Received on Thu Aug 31 2000 - 13:39:08 CDT