NetApp Tech ONTAP

NetApp publishes this monthly magazine TechONTAP which can be a useful reference.

I wrote an article on Database on NFS that explains the operational benefits of running Databases such as Oracle on NFS. Also covered is recently released Oracle 11g Direct NFS Client at high level.
The Direct NFS Client is very eloquently explained by Dave Hitz on his blog as well.
Thought I'd pass this on.

Oracle Performance Papers on NetApp Storage URLs

I keeping receiving various queries about various platform performance papers for NetApp storage for Oracle databases.
Here's the list of my favorites not in any particular order.

Database Performance with NAS: Optimizing Oracle on NFS

http://www.netapp.com/library/tr/3322.pdf


Linux (RHEL 4) 64-Bit Performance with
NFS, iSCSI, and FCP Using an Oracle Database
on NetApp Storage
http://www.netapp.com/library/tr/3495.pdf


ORACLE 10g PERFORMANCE – PROTOCOL COMPARISON ON SUN SOLARIS 10
http://www.netapp.com/library/tr/3496.pdf


AIX Performance with NFS, iSCSI, and FCPUsing an Oracle® Database on NetApp Storage
http://www.netapp.com/library/tr/3408.pdf


Linux (RHEL 3 32bit): A Performance Comparison Study of Oracle® Real Application Clusters Against
FCP, NFS, and iSCSI

http://www.netapp.com/library/tr/3423.pdf

HP-UX® 64-Bit NFS Performance with NetApp Storage Using an Oracle10gTM Database
http://www.netapp.com/library/tr/3557.pdf

Mulitple DB Writers use'm or not?

There was this comment on some blog that suggested that given that now we're in 2007 and most operating systems that matter support async i/o. There shouldn't be a need for multiple db writers.

Though I agree in principal with that. However, I have observed in my testing using an OLTP workload on a Sun V40z RHEL4 64bit Performance on Oracle that it did help performance when using multiple dbwriters as many as cores on the system. I thought I'd pass this info on for any one that may be wondering.

Space reservation on DataONTAP for Databases

There is an interesting discussion around space reservations for Data ONTAP in the following comments section -


Space Reservations in the comments section

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.