Re: Oracle & SAN Experiences?

Tim,

Of course, there are excellent arguments for having test and development environments on the same SAN.

With SAP for example, wholesale refreshes of the test and dev environments periodically take place. These are refreshed from production.

Having these on the same SAN can make a huge difference in the performance of these.

Jared

On Friday 08 November 2002 07:59, tim_at_sagelogix.com wrote:
> > 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
>
> Sounds like you're going through an excellent evaluation
> process. I would suggest to keep in mind Anjo's advice to
> also regard I/O in terms of units of throughput (i.e. read
> or write rates) instead of Gbytes or Tbytes (i.e. static
> capacity). Helps clarify the discussions...
>
> The other thing is the idea of co-mingling production and
> dev/test. Of course it is possible and quite feasible, but
> if you look at things from the perspective of units of
> throughput, you might find a huge disparity or conflict.
> Perhaps the most telling indicator might be reviewing
> whether or not your LANs for production and dev/test are
> isolated from one another -- many of the rationales for
> doing so (or not doing so) might be similar to the
> considerations for your SAN.
>
> Good luck!

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Author: Jared Still
  INET: jkstill_at_cybcon.com

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