Re: NAS with Oracle ?

On Sat, 29 Nov 2003 09:30:36 +0100, zeb wrote:

> Is NAS disks are supported with Oracle database ? I thought not but I
> read a paper from sagelogix which compare NAS and SAN with Oracle....

Support for NAS disks is vendor specific. I know that NetAppliance is supported and I don't know of anything else. The problem with NAS is that it uses LAN to access disk drives (by means of NFS) so an intense period in database activity can disrupt email, printing, file transfers and backups. LAN is the shared infrastructure, and no matter how fast it is, it will never be fast enough. SAN, on the other hand, is not as easy to attach to a PC as NAS but FC/AL is much faster then any type of LAN known to me (4GB/sec) and devoted to communication between single host and a disk array. Outlook Express or Xtreme Perversion (XP) do not enter the picture. It also costs much more. Why is it supported on the vendor basis? Because of the file locking and direct writes. When commit is issued, it is critical that the commit record is written to redo logs bypassing the buffer cache, and that it is written directly to disk. If your particular NAS implementation knows how to do that, then it's OK, otherwise it's unsupported.

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