Re: Oracle on EMC Clarion CX500

Yuval, I asked a similar (but more generic) question about SANs a month ago. Several people pointed me to an article by James Morle called 'Sane SAN'. It is introductory and excellent and can be found at www.oaktable.net . He also has another publication which I have not finished reading called " Scaling Oracle 8i", which is downloadable as a pdf on his website www.scaleabilities.co.uk. Also, there was a recent thread on this list with the subject line "Configuration of the SAN", mostly on March 29. You should be able to search the list archives to find it.  

Tom Mercadante sent me an informative email which I have attached below as well.  

Please let me know if you find any good documentation on this topic.  

Thanks!  

• Kristen

>>> "Arnon, Yuval" Yuval.Arnon_at_webloyalty.com> 4/5/2005 >>
...snipped...
We are interested in getting advice related to best practices regarding
configuration of the SAN.
...snipped...

>>>

Kristen,  

Do you have a SAN administrator? SAN Products usually need someone to set
the disks up - raid them and combine them (stripe them) together to form
logical disk groups. These groups then become the mount points for your NT
system.  

Think of the SAN as a remote disk farm. Instead of having internal disk,
You have them externally. The rest is the same.  

Depending on the SAN you use, you may have a SAN operating system - that is
- a disk cache. This disk cache buffers both reads and writes to disk to
help in performance. It is all done automatically for you.  

You need to decide the following:  

1). How many mount points do you need? With SAN disk, the philosophy is
different than with internal disk. Because of the disk cache, many of the
throughput issues go away - the SAN software is buffering the reads and

writes.
2). How do want the SAN spindles striped together? I would suggest horizontal striping across several SAN mount points. So if you have a SAN
cabinet with 20 spindles, stripe horizontally across all 20 spindles to

create logical volumes. This will spread your IO across all disk, rather
than on single spindles.
3). Hire a SAN administrator. Make him/her responsible for giving you the
mount points. This way, you can concentrate on the database alone.  

Good Luck.  

Tom

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l