RE: New NetApp storage

Just to round out this discussion for everyone else, up until about...four years ago or so, you could only run what would be stereotypically called "NAS" protocols, like CIFS and NFS. Then NetApp introduced block/SAN protocols like Fibre Channel and iSCSI support across their whole line. While most people still think of them as the nfs company, they do a lot of business with fibre channel and iscsi.  

The other nice thing about the filer is that on NetApp, block devices/LUNs are really just files on the filesystem that are mapped to individual LUN slots (i.e. this card, this WWN, this lun ID) . So, if you have a multiprotocol filer - for example, our filers are licenses for NFS, FC, and iSCSI - you can expose the same LUN over fibre channel and iSCSI, and then do an image level duplication of it over nfs (or flexclone, etc.). This allows you to, as you need, migrate storage from FC to iSCSI (i.e. expensive high performance to low cost/not as fast storage) and vice-versa on demand. We do this quite a bit in our development environments.  

Also, the performance is quite good, typically. NetApp has some pretty good FC and iSCSI performance benchmarks against the EMC Clariion and other traditional SAN arrays.  

Matt  

From: Jared Still [mailto:jkstill_at_gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2008 6:47 PM
To: Oracle-L Freelists
Subject: Re: New NetApp storage  

On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 2:33 PM, Jared Still <jkstill_at_gmail.com> wrote:

        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?

Well, here is where my ignorance of NetApp was exposed.

I had always thought that NetApp required NFS.

That is not true, though it may have been at one time.

The database servers will be connected to NetApp via Fiber Channel Protocol, so
NFS is not involved.

The person that we spent the day with is ex-Oracle, and quite knowledgeable about
both Oracle and NetApp.

The workings of WAFL were explained.

He showed us how to use Qtree's in our architecture so that future expansion will
be simplified.

FlexVols, FlexClones, LUN's, etc. were all explained pretty well and we went through
a number of examples on our new systems.

Now to set it up, benchmark it and see how it performs.

Thanks for all the replies.  

--

Jared Still
Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Thu Apr 10 2008 - 17:53:48 CDT