Re: Network Appliance with Oracle?

On Wed, 31 Oct 2001, Uwe Schneider wrote:

> Hi Jennifer,
>
> "Jennifer R. Amon" wrote:
> >
> > Folks,
> >
> > I'm looking for information about the use of
> > a NetApp Filer F740 (from Network Appliance)
> > with Oracle. We are running out of space, and
> > one of the options available to us is to get
> > one of these network appliances. It shows up
> > to the system as a mapped, network drive.
> > I'm interested to know how Oracle treats this
> > network drive when it comes to distributing I/O
> > operations.
> >
> > What if I have multiple network-mapped drives?
> > Will Oracle parallelize the I/O, or will it treat
> > these drives as if all the files were on one
> > disk drive?
>
> Oracle has certified using datafiles on NetApp NFS servers, since their
> NVRAM is battery buffered (I don't know about using SMB). Performance is
> medium on F7XX filers and excellent on F8XX filers compared to local
> attached storage. Try to connect to the filer via GBit Ethernet, since
> NFS throughput can be very fast. We measured about 70 MByte/sec. when
> creating datafiles under Linux 2.4 / F840 / Oracle 8.1.7.
>
> We found out that there is a speed-up from 7 to 14 disk volumes, but
> more disks are useless.
>
> Of course Oracle will benefit from multiple volumes if I/O is spread
> among them.

With direct-connect drives, the benefit is only seen when the I/O is spread across I/O controllers, right? So, if there are multiple partitions on a single disk or raid array, the benefit is not there. Oracle still sees and uses a single I/O controller.

That's why I'm wondering about the Oracle handling of either network drives or pseudo network drives.

>
> You may want to perform some benchmarks before going into production.
> Don't forget to run "sysstat 1" on the filer to find out about the
> bottlenecks.
>
> Uwe
>
> --
> Uwe Schneider | Telefon +49 7244 / 609504
> Karlsdorfer Str. 31 | Mail uwe_at_richard-schneider.de
> DE-76356 Weingarten | http://www.richard-schneider.de/uwe
> Linux - OS al dente!
>

Thanks! Received on Wed Oct 31 2001 - 14:42:42 CST