RE: SAN evaluation

Yes we did. I don't remember that it was a package deal. I do remember that we had a Dell server contract at the time but got an exception to buy a fully configured 2 node HP RAC solution. It wasn't HP Unix though. Windows 2000 Server at the time on HP servers.  

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    

From: Andrew Kerber [mailto:andrew.kerber_at_gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 9:52 AM
To: dofreeman_at_state.pa.us
Cc: Tom.Terrian.ctr_at_dla.mil; ORACLE-L Freelists Subject: Re: SAN evaluation

Did you have HP servers connecting to the HP SAN?

I had a hardware consultant tell me the other day that HP-UX does not support asynch IO except on raw devices. I am curious if that is a true statement.

On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 8:09 AM, Freeman, Donald <dofreeman_at_state.pa.us> wrote:

        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,

        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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-- 
Andrew W. Kerber

'If at first you dont succeed, dont take up skydiving.' 

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