The program that I manage just published a solution that I am pretty jazzed about. This is in conjunction with the EMC Celerra NS Multi-Protocol Series Array. This array allows for both traditional NAS (i.e NFS and CIFS) access as well as FCP access to the CLARiiON CX-3 Series back end array.
Yes, I know. NetApp provides multi-protocol access already. However there is a very big difference between the FCP access provided on a NetApp filer and a CLARiiON CX-3 Series array. That is with NetApp, the FCP access is a band-aid solution which is really a special file running on top of the WAFL file system. With the CLARiiON CX-3, the LUN that you see over FCP is a really, live, good, old-fashioned LUN sitting on a RAID group. No extra WAFL file system to muck up your read access, or otherwise complicate things.
In a word, it's simpler.
Having said that, NFS has its place. There are lots and lots of files which must be managed by an Oracle RAC database server which do not require the low-latency, high-performance access of FCP. Further, if you are using ASM (which we are), then many of these files cannot be stored over ASM. This means that you need a clustered file system on top of ASM.
Guess what? You already have one. Which is completely ubiquitous and automatically installed on every UNIX and UNIX-like operating system in the industry. It's called NFS.
And it works just fine for files like the CRS files, i.e. the voting disk and the OCR file. It also works beautifully for backups, flashback recovery files, and archived logs. These files absolutely do not need the high-performance, low-latency access of FCP. Why not free up your expensive SAN and use NFS over IP to manage these files?
That's the idea behind the blended FCP / NFS solution. I have not done an exhaustive search, but as near as I can tell, no other storage vendor has done this yet. The blended solution looks like this:
The blended solution can be found here. This will be the vehicle whereby our program showcases FCP solutions from EMC from now on. I hope you find it as innovative and interesting as I do.
Jeff, I know a lemon when I see one. Honestly, EMC can't be serious with this, can they?
"I have not done an exhaustive search, but as near as I can tell, no other storage vendor has done this yet."
Little wonder. Why would anyone else do this, for goodness' sakes. It's terrible! There are so many cogs and wheels in this faux "solution", not to mention the expense, footprint, power consumption, FC and IP management, and the different software for the SAN and the NAS. Not very practical, is it?
(BTW, the Celerra appears to be oddly cabled to the CX. Perhaps I'm being picky here, but it doesn't look right?)
"the LUN that you see over FCP is a really, live, good, old-fashioned LUN"
And the advantage of that is? Presumably you don't really take to VMware either, because you can't see the "really live, good, old-fashioned server" there either.
I'm stumped. What exactly is this demonstrating? There's no amount of blending going to fix the fact that the lumps in this idea are just too big to whizz away.
Disclaimer; I work for NetApp, where we have Oracle stuff that just works. But you know that.
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Response by TOSG:
Alex, I don't know you so perhaps you started working at NetApp after I left. However, I am not sure what "cogs and wheels" you are referring to.
The Celerra is shown as being cabled to a CLARiiON because that's exactly how a Celerra works: It is a front end to a CLARiiON. You have heard of the gateway filer, right? That's the same concept as the Celerra. A head sitting in front of a world-class SAN storage array.
Further, in terms of the amount of software that must be installed, it actually less than a pure FCP solution. In the case of FCP, you need to configure a shared storage layer for the CRS layer, i.e. the voting disk and OCR files. That requires either OCFS2 or raw.
With NFS, it is simply built-in.
A Celerra already includes a CLARiiON backend, and we are simply using the available ports on the piece of equipment that is already sitting there, i.e. no added equipment. We are installing less software on the database server.
So, again, what cogs and wheels are you talking about?
I can tell you that I have installed and configured Oracle RAC dozens of times, on a large number of environments. Doing it this way, i.e. FCP for datafiles, tempfiles, logfiles and controlfiles, and NFS for everything else, i.e. archived logs, CRS files, backups and flashback is far, far more manageable than a pure FCP solution, while providing identical performance. That's why a customer would want to do this.
Have you actually installed and configured Oracle RAC in an FCP enviroment? Really, I'm interested.
Posted by: Alex McDonald | February 20, 2008 at 01:53 PM