RE: To San or not to San

From: Patterson, Joel <Joel.Patterson_at_crowley.com>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2012 15:02:05 -0400
Message-ID: <C95D75DD2E01DD4D81124D104D317ACA1C75F9CE64_at_JAXMSG01.crowley.com>



Is not Raid 10 on everthing the same as S.A.M.E? Is not Raid 10 is strip and mirror (in that order), and everything takes care of the E?

Joel Patterson
Database Administrator
904 727-2546
-----Original Message-----

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Storey, Robert (DCSO) Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2012 2:48 PM To: 'oracle-l_at_freelists.org'
Subject: To San or not to San

Hopefully, I got the right address this time. Okay, generic storage question.


When I setup my current production box, we bought a beefy box with internal storage (back in 2008). Box is running fine. I had the systems folks set it up with S.A.M.E in mind. 6 internal drives, mirrored and striped to form a huge data pool (Windows based servers/etc). Built my database and away we went.

Small database, less than about 150Gig of data (and that's 12 years of stuff!)

3 years ago the move started to update our infrastructure. We move kinda slow, being local government. Big thing now was to buy a small SAN and migrate the email, file/print, etc to it, along with the Oracle world. New servers bought for my production world (without internals).

Following the same principle, I told the systems guy that I wanted Raid 10 for my oracle stuff. Unfortunately, the SAN they purchased did not allow for multiple raid types within the structure. Soooo, he did the whole darn SAN (9.6TB) into a Raid 10.

So of course, now they are running out of space. They're starting to throw wild ideas of getting another SAN just for Oracle, etc.

But, the question to the list is, whats the benefit of the SAN vs Internal storage? I'm not having any I/O issues that I'm aware of. I run a dataguard setup, so we were not going to take advantage of any shadow copy on the SAN. Given that 6, 1TB internal drives will give me MORE space than I'll ever use in the time I have remaining here, I'm just not seeing the benefit of the san.

  1. What's the benefit
  2. Is S.A.M.E still the right philosophy?
  3. Is S.A.M.E really relevant or needed given todays high-Speed SANs?

Thanks
Bob

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Wed Oct 24 2012 - 21:02:05 CEST

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