Re: SAN evaluation

  • From: "Andrew Kerber" <andrew.kerber@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: dofreeman@xxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2008 08:52:22 -0500

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
>
>
>
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-- 
Andrew W. Kerber

'If at first you dont succeed, dont take up skydiving.'

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