Robin Winslett wrote:
Has anyone got experience with running Oracle on NetApp filers? I am looking for information for a project I am involved in.
- How does performance really stack up compared with a DAS or SAN solution? Does the IP stack -vs- SCSI stack cause a significant performance lag?
In our environment, we have typically seen faster writes to the filer than to local disk (Sun UltraSCSI1 10000 rpm). We have GbE fibre between our servers and our filers and we have not seen a problem with performance. We have one F740 running about 8 instances and another two clusters of F760C's running a couple more.
- Are there compelling reasons why this would be a preferred solution?
Backups - set the database in backup mode for about five minutes and that's all. During that time you can create a snapshot of an entire filesystem and start the backup (using NDMP capable backup software).
- Are there compelling reasons why this solution should be avoided?
We did move one database off the filers because it was doing many small reads and writes (about 4 bytes each). Since the typical Oracle write size is 8K, there was a lot of wasted space in each network packet; we broke down and bought a Sun A5000.
- What are the gotchas of such a solution? Are there configuration issues that can trip you up?
We are looking at converting some of our instances from UDP to TCP, but we're not seeing immediate pressure to make the move, so we're going to hold off until it looks like it might be a problem.
I've read the whitepapers on the NetApp and Oracle sites. I am looking for someone though that has actually done this.
Thanks,
Robin winslett@ev1.net
Geoff Hardin geoff.hardin@dalsemi.com Ignorance can be cured by learning, Stupidity usually can't.