Re: Horizontally scaling a database
- From: "Dennis Williams" <oracledba.williams@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Sandeep Dubey" <dubey.sandeep@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 15:02:11 -0500
Sandeep,
I would state that "proprietary SAN has a high upfront cost, especially if
scaled for an enterprise". My understanding is that some people are working
to create SAN with commodity components. I don't know how far this has
progressed. I also believe that the so-called proprietary vendor SAN
environment is developing more standards for interchangeable
components. Part of the reason proprietary vendor products are expensive is
that they are equipped to handle "dummies" -- you can send "Fred" to the
vendor's training and with help from the vendor's support people, anybody
can have reasonable success. The other factor is how scalable your SAN is
and how immune it is to outtages. A SAN that runs a large enterprise with a
lot of critical systems better be very bulletproof.
The other issue you'll need to deal with is having redundant paths to
data from the server. This is usually done with two interface cards and the
ability to have each card appear as the other to the SAN.
Some people on this list deal with SANs and may be able to provide
better insight into the feasibility of a lower-performance non-critical SAN
built from commodity components. Some of the SAN vendors are also offering
entry-level SANs at a more reasonable price. I'm just saying that you may
want to check this aspect more completely. My understanding is that Google
does use some sort of shared storage behind their server farm. But the data
they use is only updated periodically, and most databases need to handle
continuously changing data.
Dennis Williams
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