My old friend Glenn Fawcett and I have been teaming up on Sun Oracle Database Machine DW/BI/OLTP performance engineering work, but last week Glenn told me he had an opportunity to put a late model Sun T5240 CMT system through the OLTP wringer. After consulting with me about workload options I set Glenn up with one of my favorite Pro*C Order Entry OLTP workload kits (no, it’s not TPC-C). We thought it would be quite interesting to compare a T5240 to a Sun Fire 4100 (the compute nodes in a Sun Oracle Database Machine) in a head to head test. Nothing official, just pure science. That work is still underway.
For new reader’s sake, I’d like to point out an old blog entry I made (circa 2006) after seeing a lot of TechMarketingBafoonery™ slung about by Sun competitors suggesting the CoolThreads SPARC architecture is unfit for Oracle because it is has only a single floating point engine per socket. That blog entry can be found here:
Marketing Efforts Prove Sun Fire T2000 Is Not Fit For Oracle Database Processing
What Storage To Test With?
The storage option that became available to Glenn was a Sun 7000 NAS device (a.k.a., project Fishworks). I recommended Glenn set up Direct NFS in order to efficiently drive the storage. I see that Glenn has posted some Solaris Direct NFS related information as a result of his efforts over the last couple of days. I recommend Glenn’s post about Solaris Direct NFS Configuration and Verification and Glenn’s new fledgling blog in general.
That Oracle Over NFS Stuff Is So Avant Garde
I’d like to point out, for new blog readers, that I have been a long-standing advocate of Oracle over NFS as a storage solution. The following posts are a good place to start if you want some food for thought on why Oracle Direct NFS is a good storage protocol and Oracle over NFS is a good storage architecture in general:
- My Blog Posts Prove Oracle Doesn’t Support NFS!
- Don’t Bother Trying Large-Scale Storage Without Fibre Channel SAN Technology
- Mount Options for Oracle over NFS. It’s All About the Port.
- Manly Men Only Deploy Oracle with Fibre Channel Storage – Part I. Oracle Over NFS is Weird.
- Manly Men Only Deploy Oracle with Fibre Channel – Part II. What’s So Simple and Inexpensive About NFS for Oracle?
- Manly Men Only Deploy Oracle with Fibre Channel – Part III. Did I Hear EMC Say NAS?
- Manly Men Only Deploy Oracle with Fibre Channel – Part IV. SANs are Simple, RAC is Difficult!
- Manly Men Only Deploy Oracle with Fibre Channel – Part V. What About Oracle9i on RHAS 2.1? Yippie!
- Manly Men Only Deploy Oracle with Fibre Channel – Part VI. Introducing Oracle11g Direct NFS!
- Manly Men Only Deploy Oracle with Fibre Channel – Part VII. A Very Helpful Step-by-step Install Guide for RAC on NFS.
- Manly Men Only Deploy Oracle With Fibre Channel – Part VIII. After All, Oracle Doesn’t Support Asynchronous I/O On NFS!
Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage 
Kevin, I believe the mere fact that your “NFS advocate list” is so long (10+ entries) is a strong hint that you should probably distill the NFS advocacy into a single article. 🙂
Kind regards
PS: And please keep us updated about Glenn’s head to head benchmark results. Can’t wait to see the results. 🙂
“And please keep us updated about Glenn’s head to head benchmark results. Can’t wait to see the results.”
…I’ve been analyzing the results thus far. I have to admit that I’m actually quite surprised at how well that little CMT box is holding up in the shadow of the mighty Nehalem EP on a per-socket basis. I’ll probably have to give significant thought to what is politically expedient to blog about once I’m finished with my analysis.
Kevin,
I am reading Oracle Documentation 11.1 ( Oracle® Database Storage Administrator’s Guide – 2 Preparing Storage for ASM )
NFS files—NFS files are suitable for testing, but are not a recommended configuration for production environments. Using NFS files with ASM duplicates ASM functionality.
but
Oracle® Database Storage Administrator’s Guide
11g Release 2 (11.2) 2 Considerations for Oracle ASM Storage
An Oracle ASM disk group can be created from NFS files, including Oracle Direct NFS (dNFS), as well as whole disks, partitions, and LUNs. The NFS files that are provisioned to a disk group may be from multiple NFS servers to provide better load balancing and flexible capacity planning.
Your thoughts ( resources if any ) about using ASM with Direct NFS ?
Thanks in advance,
Miladin
In my opinion the best value add ASM can have in an NFS environment is to set up normal redundancy between filers. If you don’t think your filers will ever fail, then you can get cross-filer striping by using ASM with normal NFS files and external redundancy. Either model is supported. Saying “NFS files with ASM duplicats ASM functionality” insinuates that all NFS files have the same RAID characteristic underpinnings that ASM offers and that is simply not the case. True, most filers implement mirroring and striping underneath the file system that is being exported, but it is not safe to state that matter-of-factly.