Re: Oracle & SAN Experiences?

I am off today, recuperating from a SAN failure earlier this week. Here is a very short take: our Dell SAN went down (backplane failure), taking ALL of databases along with it. This meant that all servers attached to this SAN were offline. Upon Dell "repairing" the SAN, data on one volume (mapped to production server) was corrupted and I had to restore from tape and apply a week's worth of archived logs. Time it took Dell to fix their hardware? 48 hours. We also have a new EMC Sym, and are considering abandoning SAN approach and putting all eggs into Sym, since EMC guys at least monitor their hardware and would've known of such failure prior to it occurring. Am I saying SANs are bad? No. But do consider your vendor, support level, and required reliability.

Gary

• Original Message ----- To: "Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L" <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com> Sent: Friday, November 08, 2002 9:58 AM

> The Sys. Admin. team wants to consolidate storage (and probably get a new
> toy too) on all of our servers, so they are evaluating a SAN (LSI Logic
> E4600). The DBA team is doing some research to determine the pros and
cons
> of doing this, and I'd like to hear any of your experiences (good and bad)
> using SAN with Oracle.
>
> My understanding is that all of our database servers would remain intact,
> but the attached disk storage would move into the SAN. So, we still have
> the Production, Test, and App. servers with their processors and memory,
> Oracle homes, etc. The SAN will hold database files from Production,
Test,
> Apps., staging, ODS,data warehouse, etc.
>
> Their arguments:
> -the SAN is very scalable (500 GB - 40 TB)
> -easy to manage disks in one central location
> -fancy statistics collection on all SAN disks
> -much higher throughput on the fiber SAN connections than with locally
> attached disk arrays
> -capable of using mixed RAID levels (0, 1, 1+0, 5, etc.)
> -can partition sets of disks in the SAN for specific server access
> -Snapshot backup capability is very fast in the SAN (much faster than
> traditional Oracle backups)
>
> DBA arguments:
> -How will this affect database performance?
> -What are the drawbacks, if any, with the pre-fetch of data performed by
the
> SAN (i.e., SAN cache)
> -How tunable is the SAN
> -Fast, small disks are better for performance and less wasted space than
the
> typical huge disks in a SAN (it's possible to use smaller disks in the
SAN)
> -Prove it!
>
>
> After reading the "Sane SAN" article and a case study about Volvo
> implementing a SAN, I believe it's possible to have a great Oracle/SAN
> implementation if it's setup correctly and tuned. Other resources that
you
> can Google are "Using SVA SnapShot with Oracle", "Performance Benchmark
LSI
> Logic E4600 (STK D178)", "SAN Storage for Open Systems Environments", and
of
> course check the OraFaq.
>
> Thanks for sharing,
>
> David Wagoner
> Oracle DBA
>
>
>
>
>

-- 
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com
-- 
Author: Gary Weber
  INET: gweber_at_charlesjones.com

Fat City Network Services    -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com
San Diego, California        -- Mailing list and web hosting services
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message
to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in
the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L
(or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from).  You may
also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).