RE: SAN evaluation

From: Freeman, Donald <dofreeman_at_state.pa.us>
Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2008 09:09:26 -0400
Message-ID: <51327ABA927BEF4B96590554CEA7832C0C1FB526@enhbgpri05.backup>


I'm going to be a bit vague because I don't remember all the details. We bought an HP SAN a few years ago which was our first one. We are a Windows Server shop. Two bad things happened. We bought the business copy option for about 60 or 80k and found out later that it couldn't handle all aspects of the Oracle File System. We wanted to automate this and take cold backups of our data warehouse. We wanted to create a new lun and assign it a drive letter and found out there was no way to automate it. You had to manually get in there to assign a new drive letter. So, somehow, a major feature which was one of the deciding features that steered us to buying it was totally lost.

The second thing was that parts became unavailable a lot sooner than we thought. It was a pretty significant purchase for us, about 200k, and we thought we would be able to use the thing for a long time. So, make sure you know exactly how long this thing needs to run and how long parts are going to be available. Stock up on drives. Don't assume that in three years you will be able to add another cabinet and drives. They won't be available.

Otherwise I wasn't too unhappy with it. At first it was the magic box. We added too many databases to it and found out the hard way what happens when you do that. Now we know. The support was very good the first 3 years. They offered 24X7 monitoring and a couple of times called us to tell us they were sending parts or people to fix it before we knew we had a problem.

Donald Freeman
Database Administrator II
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
Department of Health
Bureau of Information Technology
2150 Herr Street
Harrisburg, PA 17103
dofreeman_at_state.pa.us  

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

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Terrian, Thomas J Mr CTR DLA J6DIB
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 7:19 AM
To: ORACLE-L Freelists
Subject: SAN evaluation

We have just begun the process of evaluating a new SAN vendor. We are presently developing a list of criteria/requirements/questions for the new vendor. So far we have come up with the following:

  1. What is their I/O speed.
  2. What kind of SAN replication options do they offer.
  3. Presently we are using RAID 5. I would like to move to RAID 0+1. What do they recommend?
  4. Does their product have any Oracle related features. For example, I know that HP has a SAN developed specifically for an Oracle warehouse. Does their product have any bells and whistles for RAC, Streams, etc.

Has anyone gone through a similar exercise where they had to evaluate a SAN vendor? If so, could you share your thoughts with the list?

Thanks,
Tom  

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Wed Jul 09 2008 - 08:09:26 CDT

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