Why run Databases on NFS?

For the people that are new to this concept about Databases on NFS that typically ask why run databases on NFS. Sometime the question is more open minded - Can we really run databases on NFS. To that I have done some work on various platform and as have many many other colleagues at NetApp, Oracle, IBM, Sun, Red Hat and various other open source developers, I wanted to share this presentation that I did jointly with Dianne Flemming of IBM NFS engineering at NAS Conference in 2005. I thought this publicly available presentation would help DBAs and storage administrators out there evaluating this possibility.

TPC-C benchmark

I was part of the team that executed and published TPC-C jointly with IBM and Microsoft. There is a behind the scenes article that appeared in Tech OnTap journal
Tech ONTAP Jan 2006
and we also did a microsoft case study
Microsoft SQL Server Case Study with NetApp storage

Oracle Protocol Performance Papers

One of the early things that I worked on after joining NetApp was to work on this joint performance testing and paper with IBM NFS engineering

Since Netapp storage systems support NFS, iSCSI as well FCP to access to the data, we compared performance on these protocols in a given configuration and this led to work that improved NFS performance for oracle database use.

http://www.netapp.com/library/tr/3408.pdf

The paper may be useful to those that are considering deploying Oracle on AIX with NetApp storage and provides various host and storage tuning guidelines as well.

I have repeated similar paper on RHEL4 Linux
http://www.netapp.com/library/tr/3495.pdf
Here we endedup improving iSCSI driver in Linux 2.6, as well NFS in Linux 2.6 for Oracle databases.

About this blog

I work for Network Appliance Inc where I am focussed on all things database. My focus has been how to make Oracle and other databases run the best on NetApp storage systems.

Michael Eisler provided me encouragement to do this blog
http://nfsworld.blogspot.com/

and of course, our co-Founder Dave Hitz has his blog
http://blogs.netapp.com/hitz

This blog will be very technical in nature on all things database and storage. I chose to write a blog instead of writing a book, since a blog is lot more easily updated and much less work than writing a book.