Brian,
In reagards to the Solaris NFS issue, I've heard it is the other way around. UDP with Solaris and the filers is a loser but TCP works well. I have actually experienced that myself and my SE said it was a known issue with Solaris, Netapp, and <insert switch vendor here>. It's only a problem with the Solaris NetApp combo though, NFS over UDP that is Solaris to Solaris worked fine for me.
And, since this has been opened to people who haven't actually implemented Oracle on NAS, the only real issues I've heard of are when people use automount maps for Oracle mounts. Sometimes they go away and Oracle doesn't like that. But I've heard from numerous sources that are running Oracle on a filer that if you hard mount it's a great solution.
ymmv, obviously.
~JK
Brian Long wrote:
- 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?
Robin,
It all depends on which Unix platform you run Oracle. Solaris' NFS client in any release before Solaris 9 has a huge bug that slows down performance. Try exporting a filesystem on your Solaris host and mounting localhost:/filesystem. Then try some benchmarks...they stink. As I understand it, the HP-UX nfs client does not have these issues and performs well with NAS.
- Are there compelling reasons why this would be a preferred solution?
Netapp features: instant snapshot, snapmirror, snaprestore. These features are critical in an Oracle (and Clearcase) implementation.
Are there compelling reasons why this solution should be avoided?
What are the gotchas of such a solution? Are there configuration issues that can trip you up?
NFS over UDP is sometimes recommended by Netapp SE's to avoid TCP overhead. TCP is preferable in my opinion.
I have not personally implemented Oracle on NAS, but I've been in contact with folks in my company who have played with it. The Solaris gotcha is the big problem. If you're using ORacle on HP-UX, try it out.
/Brian/
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