Re[2]: Network Appliance Options

That's why you use multiple connections (switched or direct with crossover cables) and balance them. That way you change your mount points to isolate certain types of traffic or limit saturation.

We have 3 mount points for a NetApp, each on a different 100BaseT named like /mnt_n1e0, /mnt_n1e1, etc. Datafiles are separated into an OFA like directory structure that isolates certain types of behavior. For example, large indexes for database TEST might be in the directory /u09/oradata/TEST. We use symbolic links at this level, like:

ln -s /mnt_n1e1/home/u09/oradata/TEST /u09/oradata/TEST

If we wanted to isolate that to a different ethernet link, we shutdown the database and

rm /u09/oradata/TEST
ln -s /mnt_n1e2/home/u09/oradata/TEST /u09/oradata/TEST

And start the database. In a few seconds we've "moved" the datafiles in that directory to a different NFS link without Oracle even knowing it.

There are plenty of games to play if you stocked your equipment with plenty of ethernet ports.

(One word of warning, on some of the quad ethernet cards on the Sun,
I'm told that the overall throughput is far less than 4x a solo card. Be sure and check that out...)

-rje

D> Kathy - We have used them for supplemental storage on our test/development
D> system (Compaq Tru64, Oracle 8.1.6). The limitation seems to be the NFS
D> connection is slower than your "conventional" or "real" disks. For some
D> tasks this isn't a problem, but it is easy to start several large tasks that
D> saturate the NFS connection. For example, when I have to build several large
D> indexes, I copy the underlying tables to the "real" disk, and build the
D> indexes one at a time. I won't deny that I may be overreacting to some
D> problems. Other than that, it seems to work fine for our test/development
D> system where it generally receives sporadic and light use. I am told that it
D> cost much less than conventional disks. 

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Author: Robert Eskridge
  INET: bryny_at_dfweahs.net

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