Re: NAS with Oracle ?

Mladen Gogala <mgogala_at_adelphia.net> wrote in message news:<pan.2003.11.30.06.04.14.363603_at_adelphia.net>...
> 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.

Mladen,

As much as I appreciate your opinions (and sense of humor) I feel obligated to point out that, here in the US, big "B" means Bytes and little "b" means bits.

4 Gigabit FibreChannel means 4 Gbps, not 4 GBps. This is an order of magnitute different. So dual trunked GigE would also have a theoretical throughput of 4 Gbps. Latency is a whole nuther matter, though.

Switched (gigabit) Ethernet, Switch FibreChannel fabric, would seem to look the same to me on a schematic (diagram). From the reading that I have done in the past regarding NetApp, they specify use of a point-to-point Ethernet connection, so this would have no impact on the LAN, as it never even hits a switch. If it was using switched topology, it would best for it to be on its own VLAN. Hmmm, so many similarities between eithernet and fibrechannel.

So what was my point again? I kinda forget. Never mind.

Pd Received on Tue Dec 02 2003 - 16:06:35 CST