RAID 5 and Performance Degradation Concerns
Dear All
My manager (not a DBA) has put together a spec for a new disk array (Hewlett Packard XP 1024) on which we'll be running our 600GB OLTP database (64bit 8i and HP-UX 11i) and has asked for my opinions. My most immediate concern, and one which I've mentioned to him, is that it only has RAID level 1 or 5. Now we definitely need some hardware level striping so RAID 5 is our only option. I'm no storage expert, but understand that Oracle and RAID 5 is generally percieved to be a bad idea on a write heavy application due to the maintenance of parity information. He's responded that HP claim that on this array RAID 5 performs just as well as RAID 0+1 (my preferred option, we currently have an EMC Symmetrix and utilise this). I'm meeting some HP reps on Monday and want to grill them on this, but I was wondering if anybody out there has any practical experience with Oracle and this product, or any opinions on HPs claims.
Any guidance would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Austin
Re: RAID 5 and Performance Degradation Concerns
Quote:
Originally posted by hacketta1
He's responded that HP claim that on this array RAID 5 performs just as well as RAID 0+1 (my preferred option, we currently have an EMC Symmetrix and utilise this).
Tell them to put up or shut up. Have them give you two boxes to evaluate, one configured with RAID 1+0 and the other with RAID 5 and run your application on them. If there's no difference, go with the RAID 5.