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There is no simple “one size fits all” solution when it comes to storage system design for Oracle. Performance, availability, and of course budget requirements vary dramatically. Choosing a storage protocol may be one of the most critical decisions most IT teams make—although many may not think of it as a decision at all.
IT teams have traditionally deployed block-based protocols to support Oracle databases and applications, but a large number of companies today run Oracle on the Network File System (NFS). Many of these organizations—ranging from small IT shops to major Fortune 100 companies, including Oracle itself—use Network Appliance™ storage. NetApp has been a leader in the NFS market since 1992 and has pioneered and legitimized the use of NFS with Oracle.
This article describes how NetApp engineering has worked to make NFS a robust storage option for Oracle. Key investments include:
- Enhancing NFS implementations for database
- Partnering to ensure high availability
- Driving industry standards including NFSv4
- Guiding emerging technologies like Oracle Direct NFS
- Developing integrated, Oraclespecific tools
- Defining Oracle on NFS best practices We’ll begin by examining why it makes sense to design an Oracle storage architecture based on NFS in the first place.
Why NetApp NFS for Oracle?
Oracle on NetApp NFS provides users with an easy to manage and flexible infrastructure capable of running a large number of database instances. Ethernetbased NFS facilitates simple provisioning, management, and sharing plus the flexibility to rapidly move and re-purpose database and storage resources. NFS implementations are also typically costeffective as they do not require special Fibre Channel SAN expertise or training and allow IT teams to leverage standard Ethernet knowledge.
Oracle on NetApp NFS can be deployed for use in virtually any type of Oracle environment ranging from test/dev to 24x7 productions OLTP (including ERP and custom applications) environments. NetApp customers have found that— when properly configured and tuned— Oracle on NetApp NFS delivers 80-90% of the transactional performance of Fibre Channel using identical hardware and test conditions, and NFS performance is typically comparable to iSCSI. NFS can achieve the same absolute performance levels as FCP through the addition of hardware resources.
The observed differential with FCP results primarily from two factors:
- FCP protocol processing (or iSCSI when an iSCSI HBA is in use) are offloaded from system CPUs to the HBA. Since all NFS processing is done on system CPUs, NFS requires slightly more CPU resources to do the same job.
- Fibre Channel networks currently have a per network bandwidth advantage (4Gbits/sec is common) versus IP networks (1Gbit/sec is common). As 10Gbits/sec Ethernet becomes more prevalent, this advantage will go away.
NetApp has done a careful evaluation of NFS performance versus FCP and other protocols on a variety of environments, including Oracle 10g™ on Linux®, Solaris™, HP-UX, and AIX,as well as Oracle 10g RAC on Linux. You can refer to these reports for more information relative to your particular requirements.
Enhancing NFS for Database Workloads
NFS version 3 (NFSv3, the version that is in wide use today) consists of server software—for instance, the software that runs on NetApp storage—and client software running on database servers or other hosts that require access to network storage. Achieving good performance and ensuring proper behavior require that both sides of the connection, client and server, are correctly implemented.
To ensure robustness on the server side, NetApp pairs its time-tested server code with a hardware platform that delivers proven availability and reliability through features such as active-active controller configuration and double-parity RAID. The NFS client can be implemented as part of any of a number of operating systems, including Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and Linux. NetApp engineering has worked closely with all of the major implementers of NFS to verify that client implementations are functionally correct and perform well for database workloads.
NetApp has a team of interoperability engineers who have carefully studied the requirements for a storage interconnect to recover correctly from error conditions (see www.netapp.com/library/tr/3443.pdf) and have worked to make sure that NFS implementations consistently meet those requirements.
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