RE: New NetApp storage

NetApp is good stuff - the best things for you to get accustomed to are:

1. flexvols and aggregates - netapp's volume management system, which is much more flexible than most SAN arrays, but has implications as far as trying to divide IOs across different raid groups, and generally understanding how to try to lay out data
2. how WAFL (the netapp filesystem) works under the covers in terms of data placement (useful to know and understand)
3. How can you metric the netapp as far as IOs - you want to ask about sysstat vs. perfstat vs. statit
4. snapshots - get a really good understanding of how snapshots work, what they are, what they're not

What I've seen with probably ~10 customers that have moved from SAN to NAS on NetApp is how to best take advantage of the much greater level of flexibility with netapp, plus snapshots - it can be a little challenging to wrap your mind around. Also, netapp has a pile of best practices papers around running oracle over nfs, and definitely peruse them.

Thanks,
Matt
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Matthew Zito
Chief Scientist
GridApp Systems
P: 646-452-4090
mzito_at_gridapp.com
http://www.gridapp.com

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

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org on behalf of Jared Still Sent: Wed 4/9/2008 5:33 PM
To: Oracle-L Freelists
Subject: New NetApp storage  

We are moving our databases (and some other stuff) to NetApp.

This is my first experience with NetApp and using NFS as storage.

Thursday I am meeting with some NetApp technical reps.

What are some of the questions I should be asking these folks?

We've already discussed IOPs and determined what is needed in that regard, but I'm sure there must be more items to discuss that are specific to NetApp and FTP.

Thanks,

--

Jared Still
Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Wed Apr 09 2008 - 23:14:56 CDT