Re: Oracle + IBM Shark Disk Arrays

In article <ur8tqsce9qdusv6efthidk1bpq1t7bq9h3_at_4ax.com>,   kremovethisspamthingthomas_at_gfsiinc.com wrote:
> For what it's worth - we looked at the Shark and the Hitachi 7700E and
> ended up with the 7700E. We were told by IBM sales goomers that the
> Shark would do RAID 0+1 (RAID 10 ??) - but not until early next year.

Hitachi has just announced its new 9900 which is supposed to replace the 7700E at some point. The architecture of the 9900 is all fibre channel rather than a hybrid box. It should be a screamer in RAID-5 for Oracle.

They have done something no other vendor has done to date. They have placed a fibre channel switch in between the host connections and the cache/disks. Each side o fthe switch provides something like 3.2GB/Sec theoretical throughput. The 7700E and EMC used busses to xfer the data. Switches provide a point to point connection for the duration of the xfer at full bandwidth. I think this is a box to watch.

BTW, Hewlett Packard resells the 9900 as their xp-512. HP also includes a proprietary S/W package that is different than what Hitachi sells, but I am unsure of the advantages/disadvantages, but rest assured, there are some of each.

There are less costly solutions as well, I'd look to MetaStor's E4400 series as well. CLARiiON used to be a good bet for performance and price but since EMC now owns them, you can bet the cost/performance is no longer the same.

Bill Bloom Sends--

Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy. Received on Thu Aug 31 2000 - 15:05:29 CDT