Re: RAID 1 & Oracle problems?

We use mostly RAID1 and RAID5 on Sun A1000 RAID Storage arrays (SCSI - Fiber not possible with A1000, but are cheap). We have done this for at least 3 years.

No problems storing REDO on the RAID1s (on multiple A1000s - Oracle multi-plexing) and everything else on the RAID5 (more than 1 RAID5 to separate files more).

I did some extensive testing of RAID5 when we initially got our first A1000 . I tested RAID1 and RAID10 too (and no RAID also - JBOD).

It was a surprise, but all the IO intensive "read AND write"s performed about the same on RAID5 and RAID10.

This was contrary to what we have all heard about writes and RAID5. So, we contacted Sun and someone there apparently said something like "A1000s are 'optimized' for RAID5" because most customers use RAID5 , and that is why RAID5 performed so well.

Still seems odd for a vendor to do something like that at the hardware level. Anyway, it works great. The best I have seen is (as 1 example) creating a 1Gig tablespace file on RAID5 ... in about 40 seconds - about 22-24 Meg/Sec .

-- 

"Dave Hau" <davehau_nospam_123_at_nospam_netscape.net> wrote in message
news:3EF3582C.4030908_at_nospam_netscape.net...


> Sybrand Bakker wrote:

> > On Fri, 20 Jun 2003 17:41:12 GMT, "Randy Nichols"

> > <randynichols_at_yahoo.com> wrote:

> >

> >

> >>A potential customer related that they heard Oracle had problems with

RAID 1


> >>configurations.  I have not been aware of any issue with RAID 1.  Has

anyone


> >>heard anything like that?

> >>

> >

> > No, there are none. RAID-5 is of course a different story, but your

> > potential customer should proof his fairytale.

>


> Even RAID-5 is okay for usage scenarios like data warehouse where you're

> more concerned about read performance than write performance.  For OLTP,

> if you move your redo logs to a RAID-1 array and just use the RAID-5 for

> data files, I think performance won't be too bad either because most of

> the writing to data files happens in the background.

>


> Cheers,

> Dave

>
>
>
>


> >

> >

> > Sybrand Bakker, Senior Oracle DBA

> >

> > To reply remove -verwijderdit from my e-mail address

>