3.7.0 HP StorageWorks HP Scalable NAS File Serving Software provisioning guide for Oracle HP Scalable NAS (AG513-96013, October 2009)

As more resources are needed, additional servers can be added. Then filesystems
can be transparently transitioned to be presented by the new server, offloading any
over-burdened NAS heads. File sharing is not limited to Oracle files. Regular file
serving can be mixed with database access within the same cluster.
Unique benefits for Oracle deployment
The filers powered by HP Scalable NAS are a radically different NAS technology
implemented using 64-bit servers connected to shared SAN storage. When a cluster
of servers are deployed with HP Scalable NAS, they each become a high
performance, highly available NAS head that presents Oracle files over NFS. The
key differences between HP Scalable NAS and other NAS offerings in the industry
are:
• Availability. HP Scalable NAS includes a specialized NFS Server implementation
that combines with a Virtual NFS Host functionality to support completely trans-
parent NFS client failover if a NAS head failure occurs or planned maintenance
needs to be performed.
• Modularity. HP Scalable NAS supports from two to 16 NAS heads and up to
2PBytes of storage for space-hungry Oracle databases.
• Scalability. HP Scalable NAS supports truly scalable NAS. Because of the built-
in, fully symmetric, distributed cluster filesystem, all NAS heads can present any
or all filesystems with fully coherent direct read/write access. This is ideal for
Oracle RAC running over NFS. A base configuration of HP Scalable NAS can
present filesystems on as many networks as the servers themselves can support,
adding network bandwidth as necessary. Multiple interfaces per network are
supported via network bonding or, when using Oracle’s Direct NFS (new with
Oracle 11g), by using capabilities of the NFS client to utilize multiple paths to
the VNFS server running on the NAS head. The volume manager allows LUNs
presented by the shared SAN storage to be striped, thus adding to the scalability
of a filesystem created for Oracle use.
• Throughput. Since each NAS head can present any and all filesystems, throughput
is limited only by the read or write throughput of the server cluster and SAN array.
To add throughput, depending on the bottleneck, more I/O capability can be
added to the SAN storage, or CPU can be increased by adding more servers
(up to 16), and this can be done without application disruption. This translates
to higher overall Oracle application performance.
• Manageability. HP Scalable NAS includes a volume manager that supports con-
catenation and striping of LUNs. In practice, the LUNs possess redundancy
characteristics (e.g., RAID 1) at the storage array level. The volume manager’s
striping function enables storage administrators to build large, dynamically resiz-
able volumes and filesystems possessing the storage characteristics known as
Introduction12