Putting Oracle on iSCSI device....

Hello all!

We are planning on deploying PTC's PRO/Intralink (an engineering concurrent design workspace tool) on our corporate network. It uses Oracle (presumably 9) as its internal datastore. I have invested heavily in a RedHat Linux based 2TB software RAID for storing our business files. Unfortunately, PRO/Intralink only runs on Windows 2000 Professional. I'd like to use my existing RAID instead of buying a new one just to store a few 10's of gigabytes of database files.

My proposal:
  Set up a new server with a fresh install of Windows 2000 Pro. Skimp

       on storage.
  Run an iSCSI target SW on a new, raw partition on my Linux

       file server's RAID.
  Connect the new server to the file server via a dedicated 1000BaseT

       ethernet port (I have a spare port on the file server).   "Mount" the iSCSI target with Micro$oft's iSCSI software.   Format the new partition with NTFS or whatever.   Install Oracle on the new server, point the table store to the new partition.
  Go back to reading people's email.

My question:
  Has anyone out there successfully used this configuration? Perhaps someone has some experience putting Oracle's tablespace on an iSCSI device? Since iSCSI is a block level protocol (unlike NFS and SAMBA's file level protocols) and looks to Windows like another storage adapter, the horror of running Oracle over NFS shouldn't apply, right?

I'm a good Linux admin and Windows doesn't scare me, but Oracle is new to me. Luckily, I won't have to develop with Oracle, just provide it a running environment. Our PRO/Intralink rep says it won't work over NFS or SAMBA (okay, knew that), but has no experience with iSCSI.

Thanks!
-Jesse Received on Mon Mar 08 2004 - 12:17:02 CST