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Re: Horizontally scaling a database

From: Dennis Williams <oracledba.williams_at_gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 15:02:11 -0500
Message-ID: <de807caa0703161302x48a07fechb4d361c8b37f4a38@mail.gmail.com>


Sandeep,

I would state that "proprietary SAN has a high upfront cost, especially if scaled for an enterprise". My understanding is that some people are working to create SAN with commodity components. I don't know how far this has progressed. I also believe that the so-called proprietary vendor SAN environment is developing more standards for interchangeable components. Part of the reason proprietary vendor products are expensive is that they are equipped to handle "dummies" -- you can send "Fred" to the vendor's training and with help from the vendor's support people, anybody can have reasonable success. The other factor is how scalable your SAN is and how immune it is to outtages. A SAN that runs a large enterprise with a lot of critical systems better be very bulletproof.

    The other issue you'll need to deal with is having redundant paths to data from the server. This is usually done with two interface cards and the ability to have each card appear as the other to the SAN.

    Some people on this list deal with SANs and may be able to provide better insight into the feasibility of a lower-performance non-critical SAN built from commodity components. Some of the SAN vendors are also offering entry-level SANs at a more reasonable price. I'm just saying that you may want to check this aspect more completely. My understanding is that Google does use some sort of shared storage behind their server farm. But the data they use is only updated periodically, and most databases need to handle continuously changing data.

Dennis Williams

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Received on Fri Mar 16 2007 - 15:02:11 CDT

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