Since December 2006, I’ve been testing Oracle11g NAS capabilities with Oracle’s revolutionary Direct NFS feature. This is a fantastic feature. Let me explain. As I’ve laboriously pointed out in the Manly Man Series, NFS makes life much simpler in the commodity computing paradigm. Oracle11g takes the value proposition further with Direct NFS. I co-authored Oracle’s paper on the topic:
Here is a link to the joint Oracle/HP news advisory.
What Isn’t Clearly Spelled Out. Windows Too?
Windows has no NFS in spite of stuff like SFU and Hummingbird. That doesn’t stop Oracle. With Oracle11g, you can mount directories from the NAS device as CIFS shares and Oracle will access them with high availability and performance via Direct NFS. No, not CIFS, Direct NFS. The mounts only need to be visible as CIFS shares diring instance startup.
Who Cares?
Anyone that likes simplicity and cost savings.
The Worlds Largest Installation of Oracle Databases
…is Oracle’s On Demand hosting datacenter in Austin, Tx. Folks, that is a NAS shop. They aren’t stupid!
Quote Me
The Oracle11g Direct NFS feature is another classic example Oracle implementing features that offer choices in the Enterprise data center. Storage technologies, such as Tiered and Clustered storage (e.g., NetApp OnTAP GX, HP Clustered Gateway), give customers choices—yet Oracle is the only commercial database vendor that has done the heavy lifting to make their product work extremely well with NFS. With Direct NFS we get a single, unified connectivity model for both storage and networking and save the cost associated with Fibre Channel. With built-in multi-path I/O for both performance and availability, we have no worries about I/O bottlenecks. Moreover, Oracle Direct NFS supports running Oracle on Windows servers accessing databases stored in NAS devices—even though Windows has no native support for NFS! Finally, simple, inexpensive storage connectivity and provisioning for all platforms that matter in the Grid Computing era!
Very cool! Now all they need to do is update their download links so that people can actually check it out…
I am actually a little disappointed in the way that everything is heading from a grid standpoint, though. What would be very cool is a tighter integration between RAC concepts and ASM auto-balancing, to the point that Oracle would support a true shared-nothing system. In a lot of ways, it seems like they’re very close.
When we can get to the point that I can deploy some nice machines with a fast chunk of directly-attached disk (as well as the option to use network-attached disk), and just tell ASM which volumes to use and have it handle data-sharing between machines (ideally with a tie-in to the DB itself, so that frequently read data that wasn’t updated often would be replicated on all the nodes (space permitting), whereas frequently updated data would only be in two places, et cetera)… that will be a wonderful day. And scaling will simply be plugging in more disk, more servers, or both.
In theory, of course.
Richard,
Two words: Storage Grid.
Kevin,
What type of savings are we looking at in comparison to doing storage on a FC SAN? Also, what type of replication capabilities are available in the event I want to copy data from one NAS device to another at a DR site (non-oracle and Oracle related without having to use Data Guard).
Does that mean you don’t recommend a NAS unless running 11g? Where does 10gR2 fit into the NAS picture?
Hi Glen,
When it comes to NAS, yes, 11g is the best so far. However, 10g on NAS is a good match as well–just not as good. It always goes like that, right? Oracle9i requires a lot of patches for NAS so that is a bit more work and honestly, if you have a 9i database running, just keep it where it is as long as it works.
What I don’t recommend is running old Linux distros for Oracle over NFS. Stay with the 2.6 Kernels.
And like the front page of my blog states, these are MY opinions, not Oracle’s so please folks, don’t drum up a list of Metalink notes showing Oracle over NFS tips with RHAS 2.1 with Oracle9i and stuff like that. All technology information is time relevant.