Re: Unix instance with NetApp storage
Date: Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:05:36 +0100
Message-ID: <7qgrp1F9irU1_at_mid.individual.net>
On 01/05/2010 11:27 AM, Gerard H. Pille wrote:
> Hallo en een gelukkig nieuwjaar / happy new year!
>
> Our Oracle instances on AIX use DS6800 for storage, but the DS6800
> will have to be replaced.
>
> One of the candidates is NetApp. My colleague, who is responsible for
> keeping these systems up and running, warned me: "Do you know that AIX
> can only reach NetApp via NFS?".
>
> My first reaction was: "You're not seriously considering an Oracle
> instance with its data on an NFS?".
>
> But then I realized I might be getting too old for this shit, and
> getting behind the times. So I had a look around the internet.
>
> My Google skillz must be failing me, but I couldn't find anything on
> the web about this combination, apart from whitepapers from NetApp
> itself, which were quite positive.
>
> Anyone with real life experience who survived and wishes to tell about
> it?
>
> It would be very well come!
Disclaimer: my experience is a bit rusty (3+ years) and also not hands on.
Alas, we had a customer running Oracle 8.1.7 (albeit on Solaris Sparc) by that time with our application and data files were on a NetApp filer mounted via NFS (unfortunately I don't have the model handy). DB was pretty big (at least a few hundred GB) and usage patterns were a mix of OLTP and DWH. I remember they had to do some tweaking to NFS and NIC options (something about large frames comes to mind) but IIRC the performance they got out of it was good. Plus, with the filer you could take snapshots pretty fast so if there was a schema migration to do they did a snapshot before and went on so they could pretty painlessly switch back.
Now, having said that: this was not a RAC installation and a very specialized setup. And apparently tuning was not too easy but I suspect this is always the case whatever storage infrastructure you use. Maybe tools are better today I cannot really comment on that. With newer versions of Oracle and other applications the results may look dramatically different. Hope it helps nevertheless.
To sum it up: datafiles on NetApp NFS drives is certainly doable and can be fast but may not be easy to set up and tune.
Kind regards
robert
-- remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/Received on Tue Jan 05 2010 - 07:05:36 CST