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RE: disk subsystem performance question

From: DENNIS WILLIAMS <DWILLIAMS_at_LIFETOUCH.COM>
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2002 08:33:33 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.00440B56.20020410083333@fatcity.com>


John - I haven't experienced the Hitachi disks. To me the key question is how much battery-backed cache the subsystem has. I believe there tends to be a gap in knowledge between DBAs and the disk people. The two don't always understand each other or speak the same language. The Oracle books tend to assume stand-alone disks and issues like raw partitions. The disk people keep coming with new innovations. Some of those innovations may help database performance and some may hurt. I'm still waiting for the definitive book or at least a white paper so I can understand the issues. Dennis Williams
DBA
Lifetouch, Inc.
dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2002 10:38 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Hi all,

We are running both a Hitachi 7700E and a 9960 disk subsystem here and we are getting ready to move our production DBs from the old(7700E) to the new(9960) Hitachi. We have had trouble in the past on the 7700E due to disk contention and layout, i.e. we weren't striped across the array groups very well.... this caused pretty poor I/O performance. This has been a learning experience for the DBAs and the SAs here for the logical vs. physical aspects of our disks. Anyway, to make a long story short, we are ordering disk for the move to the 9960 and we have 2 choices in disk sizes - 18GB and 73GB, and 2 choices in RAID - 1+0 and 5. I would like to get the smaller, faster 18GB drives in a RAID 1+0 configuration and stripe our data across the array groups as wide as possible. However, I am running into objections from the Hitachi people that their system is "soooo fast we need not worry about such minor details". I'm having a hard time believing that given our I/O problems on the 7700E. Performance is given a high priority here.

What I would like to know is others' experience with disk subsystems - specifically Hitachi but EMC and others as well.... have you been able to "throw the disk in and forget it" or have you had success in getting to the dirty details? Have you tested or noticed an improvement with smaller, faster drives in a disk subsystem like the Hitachi or have you traveled that path and found no noticeable improvement? I'm looking for either a) ammunition that my view is correct, or b) I'm wrong and we can get bigger drives which will make Enterprise Planning very happy from a $$$ standpoint because our Hitachi capacity will last longer.

We are running Oracle 8.1.7 / AIX 4.3.3 / Peoplesoft Financials version 8. 2 production databases , one 400 GB and the other about 1TB. We've got some other production DBs but these are our big guys.

Thanks in advance for any and all input - any help is greatly appreciated. I'd be happy to share any info we have found up to this point and our experiences on the 7700E as well if anyone is interested - despite the fact I will probably bore you to death :-)

John Dailey
Oracle DBA
ING Americas - Application Services
Atlanta, GA

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Author: DENNIS WILLIAMS
  INET: DWILLIAMS_at_LIFETOUCH.COM
Fat City Network Services    -- (858) 538-5051  FAX: (858) 538-5051
San Diego, California        -- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists
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