Hewlett-Packard White Paper Sample

Abstract

HP offers a scalable, modular, high performance NAS solution for Oracle® 10g RAC and non-RAC with no single point of failure. Using NAS storage for Oracle makes provisioning and managing storage significantly easier than using SAN storage, thereby reducing the overall cost of storage. HP Scalable NAS has built-in high availability services and scales well beyond traditional NAS in both performance and scalability, making it an ideal solution for Oracle consolidation or grid initiatives. This proof of concept shows that the HP Enterprise File Server Clustered Gateway (EFS-CG) is the only scalable, highly available option when NAS is used as the storage architecture for Oracle. It focuses on a proof of concept of Oracle10g R2 Real Application Clusters with the EFS-CG as storage for all database files, Oracle Clusterware files, Oracle Home and External Tables. The paper also includes Oracle10g R2 performance results with I/O-intensive Oracle workloads. With the HP Enterprise File Server Clustered Gateway, the question is no longer SAN or NAS.

Introduction

For several years Network Attached Storage (NAS) has been rapidly evolving into an acceptable storage option for Oracle databases. With the advent of Gigabit Ethernet and software advancements in the NFS client space, reasonable performance and solid data integrity are realities on NAS. This is particularly the case when the NFS client is a Linux system.

The emerging storage demand of Grid Computing makes NAS essential. The fruition of Grid Computing will result in connectivity needs for clusters of servers numbering in hundreds of nodes. Building such a large cluster with a Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN) would be a difficult task.