SATA drives for DB?

All,

I am trying to find some decent comparisons on 'budget' disk arrays. We are currently running on 4 Sun storegde a5200, and since we are thinking on migrating to Linux, the 'support' (by SUN), might not be there for disk arrays anymore. Besides, disk arrays are 'end of life', as far as Sun is concerned, which means no more upgrades..

Notice, the A5200 is a JBOD, and will work on Linux (I know folks that use them), however, will not be supported. (we could keep them on current firmware forever though, and keep 'em running)

There seem to be really 'cheap' solutions, like the ATABoy2, from NexSAN, which has been getting rave reviews. Sun has claimed that when you have a RAID controller in front of the disks, it doesn't matter that much what kind of disk array you're running, but from some peers I've heard that they tried SATA EMC, and it just couldn't keep up with 'random IO that database generates'. Sun was trying to sell their 3511FC Array (which also has a RAID controller). Currently our RAIDs are done via Veritas.

My question is, has anyone migrated to a SATA solution w/o any problems? I couldn't find a hell of a lot of data on the subject. Any pointers you can give?

In addition, do RAID controllers really give you that much more? We currently have about 10 spindles per DB, seems like any 'upgrade' would mean fewer spindles.

The maximum performance I saw on the A5200 was ~41MB/sec when attached to Sparc II and ~57MB/sec when attached to Sparc IV on _sequential_ reads (creating 1G datafiles). I am sure on serial writes SATA solutions might be able to do as good on serial reads/writes, but will they perform well in db environment?

Our shop is OLTP by day, batch by night. IO is really not an issue during the day, and we don't have any historical data on IO performance, other then statspack logs (taken hourly every day)

The best 'test' I could come up with, would be to attach a SATA arrays as a third mirror, and see if there is any performance degragation, but it would be nice to have some expectations, prior to buying an array.

Thanks.
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We use Oracle 8.1.7.4 on Solaris 2.7 boxes remove NSPAM to email Received on Wed Oct 20 2004 - 15:49:13 CDT