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

1 Introduction

For several years Network Attached Storage (NAS) has been rapidly evolving into

an acceptable storage option for Oracle databases. It is now by Oracle’s admission

a practical deployment option for Oracle databases.

Filesystems needed for Oracle

install files (Oracle Home) or Oracle data files can be located on a remote NFS

(Network File System) server. Access to the filesystem is a simple matter of mounting

it using NFS before starting the database. With the advent of Gigabit Ethernet and

software advancements in the NFS client space, reasonable performance and solid

data integrity is a reality on NAS.

Oracle Corporation has been vocal about their own adoption of NAS for their Oracle

on Demand outsourcing business. NAS is quite often the simplest, most cost-effective

storage approach for Oracle databases. Beginning with Oracle version 11g, Oracle

includes an option to use their own NFS client, Direct NFS, on Oracle Servers for

data file access. By engineering their own NFS client, Oracle provides additional

availability features and optimizes the NFS protocol for database storage access

over NFS. Also beginning with 11g, Oracle has added support for access to storage

for datafiles over NFS from Windows Oracle servers (both RAC and non-RAC

databases) when using Oracle Direct NFS.

The emerging storage demand of Grid Computing makes NAS essential. The fruition

of Grid Computing will result in connectivity needs for clusters of servers numbering

in hundreds of nodes. Building such a large cluster with a FibreChannel Storage

Area Network (SAN) would be a very difficult, if not impossible, task.

Perhaps the most attractive aspect of deploying Oracle databases on NAS is its

provisioning simplicity. This is especially the case when Real Application Clusters

(RAC) is being deployed. There is no doubt that system administrators of any Oracle

database on NAS find it quite simple to request storage from the storage

administration group and simply mount (mount(8)) the filesystem on the database

server. Once the NFS filesystem is mounted, the server administrator’s job is complete

in regards to storage. The space is given to the Oracle DBA team and they use it

For more information about the views held by Oracle Corporation regarding NAS, see:

http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/install.102/b15660/app_nas.htm#BCFIDEJA

http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/performance/pdf/directnfsclient_11gr1_twp.pdf

HP Scalable NAS File Serving Software provisioning guide for Oracle 9