Oracle Database 10g and Low Cost Storage

Paul Tsien, Server Technologies, Oracle Corporation

Introduction

The trend in the storage industry has always been that as the disk capacity continues to increase, the price per storage continues to decrease.  Today you can purchase a 250GB disk drive for less than $500, and six months from now you probably can purchase a bigger disk drive for even less money.  Low cost storage does not necessarily mean low performance or reliability; some of the new disk arrays based on the latest, low cost, ATA disk technology actually offer reasonable performance and availability features at very attractive price points.  These disk arrays are also modular and scalable in a SAN (storage area network) environment.

Oracle can take advantage of these low cost storage systems, especially with the new storage management features built into Oracle Database 10g.  For example, Oracle and EMC made a joint presentation at Oracle World San Francisco on how to use low cost ATA disk arrays with the Oracle Database 10g Flash Recovery Area. 

Oracle also plans to encourage customers to use low cost storage for online disk backup, testing and reporting databases, or even production databases that have modest performance requirements.  The idea is that in many situations, customers can save significant amounts of money by using new, low cost, modular storage instead of traditional, expensive, monolithic storage.  This message is similar to Oracle’s low cost Linux cluster vs. expensive SMP server message. 

To demonstrate the benefits of using low cost storage in the Oracle environment, Oracle IT has begun to deploy low cost, modular storage in selected areas within the company.

In order to effectively use low cost storage in the Oracle environment, there are certain feature requirements: 

• The low cost disk array needs to be network attached either in a Fibre Channel or iSCSI SAN - for scalability and availability

• The low cost disk array needs to be sharable in a cluster - for Oracle RAC and cluster failover

• The low cost disk array needs to have fault notification, remote monitoring, and hot pluggable components - for manageability and availability

• The low cost disk array needs to be certified with major HBA vendors, switch vendors, and operating systems (especially Linux)

Other useful features include:

• Redundant components (power, fans, etc.) with no single point of failure

• Individual disks that can be configured as independent LUNs inside an array for use with Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM)

• Built in RAID-5 capability that provides a cost effective way of protecting customer data

The low cost disk array of course also needs to meet application performance requirements in terms of transaction rate, throughput and latency.

Below are two good examples of the low cost storage discussed in this article. 

References

1. Oracle Database High Availability web site on OTN

Paul Tsien (Paul.Tsien@oracle.com) is a product manager with Oracle's High Availability and Storage Management Group.  He also manages a number of Oracle storage programs including the Oracle Storage Compatibility Program and Oracle's Hardware Assisted Resilient Data Initiative.  His extensive product management and product marketing experience includes server systems, storage systems, and database products.