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RE: Storage array advice anyone?

From: Johnson, George <GJohnson_at_GAM.COM>
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 09:04:56 -0000
Message-ID: <ECD91EB68018C04CA1B6801EE47A910F335C72B5@ntas-ldn15.gam.com>

        My tuppence worth, in the book Scaling Oracle Tuning, the author poo-poo's the idea that modern storage arrays still need filesystem segregation, saying that there is so much caching and buffering going on in the array hardware, like EMC and Hitachi, that you will achieve very little by segregating the drives out. When you segregate you only end up talking to the array "interface" anyway and you have no real way of knowing exactly which disks it has selected for which filesystems.

        Sounds like one of those classic arguments, that usually only gets solved through a compromises. If possible you could try contacting your account managers from Oracle and the hardware manufacturers to ask if you can talk to other customers and get their opinion, we do that here when it's possible. You've already bought the stuff, so they are not going to lose you as a customer!

-----Original Message-----

From: Stephen Lee [mailto:Stephen.Lee_at_DTAG.Com] Sent: 13 Dec 2004 18:30
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Storage array advice anyone?

There is a little debate going on here about how best to setup a new system which will consist of IBM pSeries and a Hitachi TagmaStore 9990 array of 144 146-gig drives (approx. 20 terabytes). One way is to go with what I am interpreting is the "normal" way to operate where the drives are all aggregated as a big storage farm -- all reads/writes go to all drives. The other way is to manually allocate drives for specific file systems.

Some around here are inclined to believe the performance specs and real-world experience of others that say the best way is keep your hands off and let the storage hardware do its thing.

Others want to manually allocate drives for specific file systems. Although they might be backing off (albeit reluctantly) on their claims that is it required for performance reasons, they still insist that segregation is required for fault tolerance. Those opposed to that claim insist that the only way (practically speaking) to lose a file system is to lose the array hardware itself in which case all is lost anyway no matter how the drives were segregated, and if they really wanted fault tolerance they would have bought more than one array. And around and around the arguments go.

Is there anyone on the list who would like to weigh in with some real world experience and knowledge on the subject of using what I suppose is a rather beefy, high-performance array.

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Tue Dec 14 2004 - 03:05:37 CST

Original text of this message

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