RE: Any good papers on raid 10 setup for oracle?
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:17:53 -0500 (CDT)
Message-ID: <bf2c456c18595787617fad95758e0bd3.squirrel_at_society.servebeer.com>
> We are going to be testing some raid 10 and our SAN Admin set the stripe
> size to 512 bytes. From what I have read in the past, I was thinking Oracle
> would do better off closer to a stripe size of
> <db_block_size>*multibock_read_count, however it has been awhile since I
> looked into it. I know it always depends, but the 512 bytes doesn't sound
> correct to me
We went through this not too long ago. The answer is, as usual, "it depends". It's best for you and your team to experiment with different values to see which is "best". Keep in mind Oracle's specific IO patterns, e.g. indexed reads versus full table scans for reading and DBWR versus redos on the writing.
There are tools like Orion to help evaluate IO. They are a great start to eliminate some configurations, but I found generating my own SQL gave me more realistic expectations.
If I sound like I'm being somewhat vague and generic, it's because I am! This is a HUGE topic that will require you and your team to do their homework. Like another poster mentioned, involve your vendors! You'll hopefully find that they are interested in helping you, if only to prevent some hollering later on... :)
One final note -- even though I view myself as a BAARF-type, I was not able to justify the expense of RAID-10 over RAID-5 for our little IBM DS5300 SAN with reasonably beefy POWER6 hardware pushing it, taking into account performance, reliability, and of course cost. Waaay too brief, I know, but my point is to thoroughly investigate all of your options.
GL!
Rich
-- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-lReceived on Fri Sep 25 2009 - 11:17:53 CDT