Re: Pure Storage opinions
Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2016 16:55:14 -0500
Message-ID: <CAHJZqBAiiWUyC1TrSYkGbO+PsMKidMuZfKteFUca23SuGf1A=Q_at_mail.gmail.com>
We use Pure Storage. We have a *very *busy system that their FA450 had some trouble keeping up with. We would sometimes see a parallel index creation or expdp from dev cause a latency spike in the array that would result in a spike in log file sync waits on prod. Pure says this was due to throwing more I/O than their NVRAM can triage, so things back up.
We've just upgraded to an //m70 this past week. Not a lot of time to judge but it seem to be doing great so far. We definitely were pushing the limits of the smaller system. Hopefully the //m70 better handles what we throw at it. Pure Support did say that we were in the top 1% of their clients in terms of I/O activity. If the //m70 keeps performing well we are considering adding another to each datacenter. Snapshot replication between arrays is also great if you have the network bandwidth for the given DB size.
The thin snapshot cloning is the greatest thing ever. Cloning our prod DB for dev or staging went from 2-3 days to 15 minutes. We built a script around it so spinning up new clones can be in a few minutes once the volumes are provisioned and assigned to the DB hosts. The browser UI is also very nice, and REST API is great for scripting.
The one gripe I have with their support team is that they were quick and insistent on blaming Oracle or our DBA team for the performance problems in the FA-450 array, even after we kept clearly pointing out that the issues happening across DBs show that it can't be. And the fact that I once caused a latency spike by running an "rm" on a set of datapump files on a volume. Just today we had a call about volumes unmounting during "online" maintenance causing DBs to crash and they kept asking what version of the database we were using. That's like asking what model car you drive if you hit a pothole in the road and get a flat tire.
We also used to have a ZFSSA (7420). Those here that are familiar with my tweets and emails know that I would not recommend it for running databases on. If you use it to hold backups, fine. But we had nothing but horrible performance trying to run even our staging/test databases on. First it was problems with infiniband and DNFS that were due to bugs in the OFA kernel module that are fixed in OEL but Oracle refused to share with RHEL (we use RHEL). Then we'd see problems where the NFS mounts would suddenly hang and the databases would crash. Every part of the network stack was poked and prodded and nothing was ever found.
The most frustrating part of it all was Oracle Support. Their selling point was that having Oracle for database and storage meant less juggling for us. This was not the case as we'd have to re-explain the situation every time an SR got handed off to a new tech. Eventually we just had to tell our account manager to cut the bullshit and so everything flowed through him. In the end we had to negotiate a return and I'm pretty sure Oracle just sent them to scrap.
I'm sure there are folks out there that have had great experiences with the ZFSSA and live databases (their sales people and PMs insist so) but it certainly was a huge rotten lemon for us. The real thumb in the eye was when they tried to steer us to an Exadata to replace it.
Don.
On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 2:27 PM, Jeff Chirco <backseatdba_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Anyone use or used Pure Storage for your database storage? We currently
> have NetApp and it is coming on a hardware refresh so we are looking
> around. We've looked at the ZFS which seems really nice, a little more
> expensive than we though but great for Oracle database. Now my system
> admins are looking at Pure Storage as a possibility as well. From what I
> read it seems like a all flash system and apparently hardware freshes are
> built into the support contract. Let me know if you have any onions.
> Currently we are running Oracle on Windows Server 2008r2 with 11.2.0.4 but
> moving all over to Oracle Linux and eventually 12c.
>
> Thanks,
> Jeff
>
-- Don Seiler http://www.seiler.us -- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-lReceived on Wed Apr 20 2016 - 23:55:14 CEST