Re: Getting the best out of new server hardware: a disk setup for Oracle database

Mladen Gogala kirjoitti:
> Why do you want mirrored Oracle binaries? Even with the most aggressive
> patching strategy, it's highly unlikely that Oracle binaries will ever
> change at the rate with which backup software will be be unable to keep
> up.

Mirroring the operating system disk and Oracle binaries disk gives me protection against single disk failure. If running them unmirrored, a disk failure would mean both downtime and a need to restore everything from backups.

> Second, what do you need ASM for? Do you need RAC?

No RAC here. I found ASM to be the easiest way to implement S.A.M.E on this setup where we have six independent RAID 1+0 sets directly connected to the server. ASM will stripe everything over the six sets and quarantee that there are no "hot spots". This sounds much simpler than putting ext3 on the RAID sets and then try to manually distribute the IO load over the sets by manually relocating Oracle datafiles between the sets.

> why do you want to install relatively new volume manager, which consumes
> quite a bit of resources and who has quite a few bugs

Actually I'm a little bit worried about the robustness of ASM and ASMlib. Everything inside ASM is just 100110101000110's for OS and human eye. In a traditional setup if one datafile gets corrupted it is all we lose. With ASM a single bit error could mean that all data is lost.

Has anybody practical experiences on the robustness of ASM and ASMlib?

--
Heikki