Re: Network Appliance with Oracle?

Hi Jennifer,

"Jennifer R. Amon" wrote:
>
> Folks,
>
> I'm looking for information about the use of
> a NetApp Filer F740 (from Network Appliance)
> with Oracle. We are running out of space, and
> one of the options available to us is to get
> one of these network appliances. It shows up
> to the system as a mapped, network drive.
> I'm interested to know how Oracle treats this
> network drive when it comes to distributing I/O
> operations.
>
> What if I have multiple network-mapped drives?
> Will Oracle parallelize the I/O, or will it treat
> these drives as if all the files were on one
> disk drive?

Oracle has certified using datafiles on NetApp NFS servers, since their NVRAM is battery buffered (I don't know about using SMB). Performance is medium on F7XX filers and excellent on F8XX filers compared to local attached storage. Try to connect to the filer via GBit Ethernet, since NFS throughput can be very fast. We measured about 70 MByte/sec. when creating datafiles under Linux 2.4 / F840 / Oracle 8.1.7.

We found out that there is a speed-up from 7 to 14 disk volumes, but more disks are useless.

Of course Oracle will benefit from multiple volumes if I/O is spread among them.

You may want to perform some benchmarks before going into production. Don't forget to run "sysstat 1" on the filer to find out about the bottlenecks.

Uwe

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