Re: DBA Experiences with Oracle and RAID 0+1

I agree with Ixora's criticism of SAME; however, I think that Oracle is justified in offering a solution that will provide adequate performance for those DBA's who don't understand RAID. That some DBA's don't understand RAID is evidenced by the inevitable response to read up on OFA and the 22 disk solution.

If you set up multiple stripe sets, per the Ixora paper, then you can treat those stripe sets as "disks" and implement OFA and the 22 (or 7 or whatever) disk solution. But the SAME solution works in most cases.                                                                                             

                    Glenn                                                              
    
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                    01/15/2002                                                         
    
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I assume you've read the white paper available on metalink or technet concerning the concept of striping and mirroring everything (S.A.M.E.).

There is a criticism of this configuration at ixora:

http://www.ixora.com.au/newsletter/2000_10.htm#same

Personally, I feel that the S.A.M.E. architecture is a good one for the vast
majority of Oracle installations. I went this route on my new server because
the administrative overhead associated with managing datafile distribution and storage allocation outweighed the impact of what could be argued to be less than optimal disk performance. My experience has been that the difference is performance has been pretty much insignificant anyway.

The number of disks in your stripe really matters when it comes to performance. When I decided to implement a SAME architecture, I configured the system with 36 drives - striped across 18 and mirrored. Do you feel that the raw I/O performance of your drive configuration is sufficient for the demands of your database? Are you being asked to meet a performance goal
within the constraints of a fixed budget or are you allowed to spend what is
required to meet a specific performance goal?

Glenn Stauffer

On Monday 14 January 2002 03:40 pm, Jon Behnke wrote:
> We are in the process of setting up a SAN using RAID 0+1 for our
database.
> In our current environment, we are able to separate our tables, indexes,
> rollback segments, and archive logs on different disks. On the SAN we
> would have six 73 gig disks on RAID 0+1 for a total of about 210 Gig of
> usable space (3 disks worth of space).
>
> Some white papers that I have read suggest attempting to separate the
data,
> indexes, and rollback segments on separate RAID volumes, and others
simply
> suggest that the performance boost of striping will supercede the
> separation of these items.
>
> Can anyone offer any comments or suggestions?
>
> Jon Behnke
> Applications Development Manager
> Industrial Electric Wire & Cable
> Phone (262) 957-1147 Fax (262) 957-1647
> jonb_at_iewc.com

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