Like any other storage system, whether is it NAS (NFS, CIFS) or SAN (SCSI, FC, iSCSI, FCoE), you should never, ever, ever allow it to become completely full.  Especially when using structured apps like databases.  Oracle crashes when the file system gets full (it would do the same with a SAN attached lun) because Oracle constantly needs to have disk space available to write to.  Once full and crashed, it can’t start up for the same reason.  No space available to write anything – data, logs, control information updates, etc…

The simple solution is not to let that happen to you.  If there is space available in the containing aggregate you can use the volume autogrow option to increase the size of the exported volume in definable increments up to a definable maximum.  Eventually though, you will run out of space or reach the maximum and the same thing will happen.  Whenever your aggregate gets 80% full or higher you should start the process to either free up space or add capacity to the system.  Once the system aggregate goes above 90% full you’re in the red zone.  If you let it get more than 95% full that’s your bad.

The percentage figures quoted here are my own professional opinion.  They are not company policy numbers endorsed by NetApp or any other storage vendor (although I doubt they would disagree).

Hope this helps

Paul Brosseau
Systems Engineer
N/A East - Chesapeake Dist.
301-351-5165 Mobile
Paul.Brosseau@netapp.com
www.netapp.com

From: Li, Jackie (Yanhui) [mailto:YLi@ea.com]
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2008 1:34 PM
To: toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: oracle coruption caused by NFS file system is full

Our firm runs oracle 9i using NFS file system from Netapp(3040 running 7.2), we have noticed few cases now that when the NFS file system is full, oracle database crash and can not even start after that.

It turns out that database has logical corruption, does anybody experience similar issues?

Thanks