Seeking an alternative to SAN/NAS: JBOD & 10g ASM?

Hello,

I'm currently designing the renewal of an old Oracle environment. The old enviroment consists of four-year-old HP-UX 2CPU server and numerous SCSI disks placed in a couple of disk arrays. Some of the disks are mirrored, some of them are not. Striping is not used.

The new environment will assumably be based on a 2CPU Linux server with 16 GB RAM. The old enviroment had very limited IO performance and now it is time to build a better disk/storage system. I have talked to some experts and all they say is "go SAN". It could be something like 2 Gbps FC cards on server, a EMC CX300/CX500 storage unit and then a pile of disk arrays and fiber disks. The "stripe-and-mirror-everything" would be used.

Since I never believe what the experts say :-) I'm now wondering what could be an alternative to the suggested expensive and quite complex SAN solution. What if we just attach some 2 Gbps FC cards on the server and connect them to some FC "dummy no raid" disk arrays. The disks would be configured as RAW devices on OS level and then the 10g ASM could take care of both striping and mirroring. There could be a pile of disks for database files, some disks for redo and archive logs and some for flash recovery area. To get more IO speed it would be possible to use a solid state disk for online redo logs.

What I'm looking for is maximum IO performance using a minimum number of Euros. I'm not easily buying that an expensive and complex SAN system would be the only feasible alternative. Could you please say if I'm right or wrong?

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Heikki