Re: Anybody using Network Appliance Storage boxes with Oracle?

We're going through a "certification" process, so to speak (offline if you're curious), w/NetApp right now. My testing against a 100 million row (+) table is thus far positive, but testing is really in it's infancy. A few comments:

• we're using tcp, not upd (reasons should be obvious)
• Gigabit ethernet cards in server and filer (a must, according to NetApp)
• test filer config is an 840 w/2 racks of 7*36 gig drives (very expandable)
• Prod should have 2 * 840's w/tdb disk layout
• Don't use 72 gig drives (we begged for 36 - again, reasons are obvious)
• yes, you can have one big wafl volume, but more are recommended for recovery opps (ie: one volume for data files, one for redo, archives, control files ...)
• am running online redo and archived on local disk (but can be run on the filer, just not that brave)
• snapshot capabilities look cool, but not yet tested
• PQO queries on 4 * 3 million row partitions do appear quicker than our prod implementation
• Have heard big updates can be slow (this will be tested soon)
• hasn't shat itself yet and, to be honest, haven't seen the filer cpu top 20% (don't read anything into the latter comment though)
• turn disk_asynch_io off or you may (probably will) encounter dbwr problems
• jury out on whether mimicing async io w/db_writer_processes (or io_slaves) is worthwhile (NetApp does recommend it)
• Various other filer, nfs options necessary (but simple to implement)

To be honest, setup was easy. The only eebie jeebies (how do you spell that??) are nfs related. New territory, does it work, will it fail - just how safe is the nvram? Anyway, all looks good and I can say the NetApp support team are bending over backwards to assist us - so that's good. Another associate down under is in testing on a much bigger implementation than ours and he, too, seems confidant. We are obviously not in production and have a ways to go yet.

Keep in mind that w/NetApp your sysadmins can tool around. EMC is a black box.  We like control and that's one of the big reasons we're down this path. NetApp costs less too, although dollars are not my game, thankfully.

Please feel free to ping me w/any questions.

Cheers,

Casey ... Received on Wed Mar 21 2001 - 19:01:29 CST