Several years ago, we put our Oracle datafiles on our F880. We quickly found out that if you expect to do things like mount your database, you should turn off async_io. That was on Solaris 7, Oracle 8.1.6, and DOT 6.2.2 BTW. It's well known that Solaris 7 had really bad support for async_io, so I'm sure that has improved since.

Once I finally get to bed this Sunday morning, we should be on Oracle 8.1.7.4, Solaris 9 MU 5, and DOT 6.3. In looking at the NOW site, I found some docs that recommend turning it on, and some that recommend turning it off. I'm going to try to squeeze an official answer from NetApp tomorrow, but I'm curious what experiences other people have had. Any comments?

Jason