Mounting Storage ... NFS?

From: Pat <pat.casey_at_service-now.com>
Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 10:19:11 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <dc3ebff0-52ba-4ae9-827d-314ae0939ff8@z72g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>

So ... we're getting a new SAN in one of our data centers (a netapp 3040). If you're not familiar with netapps, one of their big things is that you don't have to buy another head unit to expose storage as NFS
(as opposed to fiber channel). This is one of those features which
struck me as only moderately interesting from a database perspective, since I just kind of assumed we'd link everything up via fiber channel anyway.

That is until we had the netapp rep on the phone and he blithely suggested we mount the primary storage on our database servers as NFS.

After I finished coughing up a lung (since my instinct is never, ever, ever put operation storage on NFS for latency and stability reasons), he went on to assure us that this is an Oracle recommended configuration and, in fact, the Oracle On Demand grid uses precisely this approach.

Is anybody actually doing this? I'm assuming with fast ethernet
(10GBS) and low collision rates, I could get good throughput
relatively to a 4GBS fiber channel card, but there's be inevitable latency issues added wouldn't there?

Is my instinct to run screaming from any kind of NFS storage archaic, or is the netapp guy just spouting a load of hooey? Received on Sun Jun 08 2008 - 12:19:11 CDT

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