Oracle on Netapps - Volumes setup question

Looking for just a hint or comment on setup of storage for Netapps dedicated to Oracle Linux IBM Itanium2 x455s with latest Redhat EL 3.0 Update 2 .

The Netapps are fairly new (last 12 months purchased), but not sure of model numbers . The network is suppose to be isolated from other Ethernet traffic and we are only doing TCP (no UDP). Not "exporting" disks, just doing mounts for the Netapps storage with automount at reboot.

QUESTION: The main question ..... I'd really appreciate comments on are wouldn't we be better off with 8 volumes with 7 disks each rather than 4 volumes with 14 disks each?

I know it depends... and to complicate it , we will have a mixture of about 40 instances on 4 x455s and 1 x445 (Xeon) . Seems more volumes would give more flexibility to isolate high I/O instances.

I've done lots of Oracle on several Unix systems and have worked on Linux some, but know very little about Netapps. I am use to the local RAID devices. I keep hearing ... yeah, but Netapps is different using a "special" RAID4 setup?

About to install Oracle9iR2 (and some 10g) on new hardware we are migrating to and don't know a lot about Netapps network storage.

I have read several articles about SAN vs NAS and heard the usual about network's config needs special separation for NAS. I liked the Oaktable.net article on SANE SAN, but out of my control that we are using Netapps NAS/NFS for ALL Oracle files. I've seen articles on putting REDO, alert.log, ctl files on local disks, but others are saying that is "old - only a problem with old versions of Linux".

Anyway, I haven't seen much on Netapps other than what our Sysadmins and Netapps admins say. In our company, the job of Sysadmin, Netapps admin, and Oracle DBA are all separate roles/jobs. Use to be more involvement between these roles and I am glad I am at least being asked for how to config the Netapps.

I keep hearing just create 1 large volume per tray (14 disks) and you will be better off. We will need about 8 trays for our storage needs with one instance about 2 Terabytes and several in the 100's of Gig.

If I go with what I am hearing we will have 1 volume per 14 disks and we will have some separation with 4 volumes .

The qtress don't seem to buy me much with the ability to put quotas on something like a folder.

Thanks in advance for any comments.

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