Re: Network Appliance with Oracle?

Hi Jennifer:

Good Question! The safe answer before testing is that 'your mileage may vary'. When looking at a NAS or SAN solution remember that you must also be concerend with your network and not only your storage. Also, The Netapp 740 only goes up to about 1 TB raw. So you should really double check to see how much storage you need and what the file system and snapshot reserve is . You may have to go to an 800 series filer if you expect your storage requirements to go over 600 GB useable... (very rough estimate)

Good Luck!
Michael Linett - President
Zerowait Corp. 888.811.0808
High Availability Network Analysis & Engineering www.zerowait.com www.nas-san.com www.loadbalancing.net What Does High Availability Mean To You? Data Storage * Load Balancing * VPN

"Jennifer R. Amon" <jamon_at_apk.net> wrote in message news:<Pine.GSO.4.30.0110311539500.4273-100000_at_junior.apk.net>...
> 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 Fri Nov 02 2001 - 16:44:04 CST