Did you have HP servers connecting to the HP SAN? I had a hardware consultant tell me the other day that HP-UX does not support asynch IO except on raw devices. I am curious if that is a true statement. On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 8:09 AM, Freeman, Donald <dofreeman@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I'm going to be a bit vague because I don't remember all the details. > We bought an HP SAN a few years ago which was our first one. We are a > Windows Server shop. Two bad things happened. We bought the business > copy option for about 60 or 80k and found out later that it couldn't > handle all aspects of the Oracle File System. We wanted to automate this > and take cold backups of our data warehouse. We wanted to create a new > lun and assign it a drive letter and found out there was no way to > automate it. You had to manually get in there to assign a new drive > letter. So, somehow, a major feature which was one of the deciding > features that steered us to buying it was totally lost. > > The second thing was that parts became unavailable a lot sooner than we > thought. It was a pretty significant purchase for us, about 200k, and we > thought we would be able to use the thing for a long time. So, make > sure you know exactly how long this thing needs to run and how long > parts are going to be available. Stock up on drives. Don't assume that > in three years you will be able to add another cabinet and drives. They > won't be available. > > Otherwise I wasn't too unhappy with it. At first it was the magic box. > We added too many databases to it and found out the hard way what > happens when you do that. Now we know. The support was very good the > first 3 years. They offered 24X7 monitoring and a couple of times > called us to tell us they were sending parts or people to fix it before > we knew we had a problem. > > > Donald Freeman > Database Administrator II > Commonwealth of Pennsylvania > Department of Health > Bureau of Information Technology > 2150 Herr Street > Harrisburg, PA 17103 > dofreeman@xxxxxxxxxxx > > > -----Original Message----- > From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx > [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Terrian, Thomas J Mr > CTR DLA J6DIB > Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 7:19 AM > To: ORACLE-L Freelists > Subject: SAN evaluation > > We have just begun the process of evaluating a new SAN vendor. We are > presently developing a list of criteria/requirements/questions for the > new vendor. So far we have come up with the following: > > 1. What is their I/O speed. > 2. What kind of SAN replication options do they offer. > 3. Presently we are using RAID 5. I would like to move to RAID 0+1. > What do they recommend? > 4. Does their product have any Oracle related features. For example, I > know that HP has a SAN developed specifically for an Oracle warehouse. > Does their product have any bells and whistles for RAC, Streams, etc. > > Has anyone gone through a similar exercise where they had to evaluate a > SAN vendor? If so, could you share your thoughts with the list? > > Thanks, > Tom > > > > -- > //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l > > > > > -- > //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l > > > -- Andrew W. Kerber 'If at first you dont succeed, dont take up skydiving.'