On Tue, 3 Mar 2009, Brad Knowles wrote: > Our previous Storage Guy had previously worked at Oracle, where they did > a lot of hosted solutions, in the massively huge datacenter they have > here in Austin. They didn't use anything *but* NetApp filers. He
That was a primary driver for us using NetApp NAS. Actually, one of the key reasons at $WORK-2 that we chose NetApp was so we could do NAS for most of our data, and SAN for the Oracle database, all in one box. We quickly realized that NAS was simpler, easier and better for Oracle (at least in our case), and we switched. We never looked back. We (the admins) loved it. The DBAs loved it. > They've found that when they put their databases on NetApp filers, they > simply no longer have to worry about managing the storage -- just make > sure they've got enough disk space for the various different types of > volumes they need (with appropriate spindle speeds and counts), and the > rest just manages itself. Actually, we go even further. It's been a battle, but we're working on convincing the Oracle people here that spindle speeds and counts *don't matter anymore*. In our test lab, we have a wide variety of storage, and we have an IBM SVC in front of it all. The DB engineers keep running functional and performance tests. A few times now, when they've run their performance tests, we've actually migrated their LUNs around the SAN with the SVC. We've gone from 15K to 10K FC, from FC to SATA, from IBM to HP to EMC storage and back again. They haven't noticed! On the SAN side, I'm definitely an SVC convert -- we love the thing. With the way storage is changing, especially from companies like 3PAR, Compellent, and HP with the EVA line, spindles just don't matter anymore, and the whole idea of "I must have eight spindles of RAID1" just doesn't make any sense. We're fond of saying "RAID is dead" around here. We want the DBE's to tell us what the need is -- what level of IOPS and protection do you need, and let the storage engineers worry about providing that to you. -Adam _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
