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Configuring Large Disk Arrays in an Oracle Environment. Glenn Fellin The Regence Group. The Regence Group. Sixth Largest Healthcare Plan Affiliation in the Nation Not-for-Profit Companies Main Locations: Seattle, Washington Portland, Oregon Salt Lake City, Utah Lewiston, Idaho
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Configuring Large Disk Arrays in an Oracle Environment Glenn Fellin The Regence Group
The Regence Group • Sixth Largest Healthcare Plan Affiliation in the Nation • Not-for-Profit Companies • Main Locations: • Seattle, Washington • Portland, Oregon • Salt Lake City, Utah • Lewiston, Idaho • Tacoma, Washington • Salem, Oregon • 60,000 Claims Processed per Day
The Portland Site • Mainly Solaris and AIX UNIX Environment • 80 UNIX Servers • 5 TB of UNIX Data, mostly VM Managed • Oracle Database with Custom Applications
Why DBAs like Small Spindles • Up to 20% Slowdown: 9 -> 18 GB Drives • Spindles Dedicated to a Read / Write Process • More Buses to share the load
Large Storage Lessons Learned • Host ‘yoda’: The Blob method • Host ‘c3po’: Balancing I/O • Host ‘antares’: Partitioning the I/O • Host ‘droid’: Independent Data Paths
Problems with Large Storage • Large Spindle Sizes • Fewer Host Interfaces • Very Large LUNS • “SAN” Expertise Needed
Why Change? • Our Data Warehouse has 514 Disks • Many MTBF Failures • Unmanageable Growth • Need fewer, Larger Disks • Performance Must be Better
“Secret” Methods • Offloading Mirroring • “Fast Writes” • Mirror Reads • Striped Read RAID 5 • Pre-fetch Read Algorithms • Advanced Write Algorithms
Balancing Factors • Availability • Reliability • Performance • Manageability
Critical Performance Factors • I/O Processes Sharing Storage • “Independent Data Paths” • Controller to Drive Ratio • Cache Size • Array Algorithm • SAN Architecture
Opportunities for Improvement • Vendor Connectivity Incompatibility • Infrastructure Management • Standards
The Performance Bottom Line • Know Where the Data is • Optimize for Your Environment • “As Fast as Necessary”