Re: Oracle OK with RAID5 volumes ?

From: George Dau <gedau_at_isa.mim.com.au>
Date: 1997/11/28
Message-ID: <347e29b1.4373839@isafin1>#1/1

jimm_at_fcs.wa.gov.au (Jim McGrady) wrote:

]Good Day All
]
]We currently run Oracle 7 with forms on a Sun Solaris 2.4 system.
]We are planning to move onto new Sun hardware running Solaris 2.6.
]
]Does Oracle still require a large number of individual disks for good
]IO distribution ? Or could we use a RAID5 approach on the new system ?
]I had in mind to use an 8 - 10 disk RAID volume for the majority; with
]a few physical disk partitions for raw devices.
]
]Advice would be welcome

Jim,
We have Solaris 2.4 on Sun 1000e servers and use the SSA100 RAID boxes and the Veritas volume management software. This allows a mixture of RAID5, mirrors and concat disk within the array, even on the same individual disks. RAID5 writes are slower but not slow enough to affect our app. The app runs faster with RAID5 than it did on plain disks connected in a Sun DiskTower. Here are the stats:

isa2:/u01/home/ged># vxstat

                        OPERATIONS           BLOCKS        AVG TIME(ms)
TYP NAME              READ     WRITE      READ     WRITE   READ  WRITE 
vol swap1           364771    362496   2918168   3634568    7.3    3.4 
vol swap2           361465    358318   2891720   3631104    7.7    3.4 
vol swap3           360800    357576   2886400   3630576    7.7    3.4 
vol swap4           361782    359067   2894256   3630944    7.7    3.4 
vol swap5           357708    357470   2861664   3633224    7.8   10.6 
vol u02            1471635    426679  24917933   6304896   14.6   87.8 
vol u03             269256     16072   4400905    164180   10.2    4.7 
vol u04             216620     33493  21782190    334084   17.1    4.1 
vol u05            2478233   1157236  83152852  10451816   16.8   28.5 
vol u06            1799928   1081168  30292183  16911404   13.1   41.3 
vol u07             804327       333  12834091      5148    6.9   26.4 
vol u08              52610     93807   5040574   7646300   22.0   12.5 
vol u09             111854    559233   3909546   6042420   13.8    3.8 
vol u10             113042    510001   2317614   4175656   16.1    8.3 
vol u11              26543       528   2936938      5412   13.7   25.9

isa2:/u01/home/ged># uptime
1:16pm up 5 day(s), 15:06, 115 users, load average: 3.19, 3.02, 2.67 isa2:/u01/home/ged>#

The swap volumes are 2-way mirrors. /u02 is RAID5. /u03 and /u04 are striped (no raid or mirror) /u05 is RAID5 -Production DB, /u06 is RAID-5, /u07 is striped, /u09 and u10 are 2-way mirrors , /u11 is just a disk, no fancy stuff at all.

I can send you more info if you like.
Regards,
George.

-- 
 ,-,_|\   George Dau,                                             __
/    * \  Unix (Solaris, DEC Unix, Linux), NT, Oracle, Internet. (OO)
\_,--\_/  Home: gedau_at_pobox.com          Work: gedau_at_mim.com.au ( \/ )
      v   WWW:  http://pobox.com/~gedau                          W--W

Food for spambots: 
macsupport_at_SendAd.com webmaster_at_SendAd.com xiaocf_at_cybersurf.com.sg
sowell_at_bizzy.net dey_at_algonet.se betters2_at_usa.net
comments_at_martianconsulate.com tracyb813_at_sprintmail.com
orders_at_amazon.com help_at_amazon.com info_at_amazon.com
catalog-typos_at_amazon.com feedback_at_amazon.com suggestions_at_amazon.com
marketing_at_amazon.com associates_at_amazon.com press_at_amazon.com
cheri.devine_at_tokyo.jp Visa&MasterCard_at_AOL.COM remove_at_SendAd.com
webmaster_at_SendAd.com suggest_at_SendAd.com onwave_at_mlmail.com

Received on Fri Nov 28 1997 - 00:00:00 CST