SAN or NAS for Oracle?

[chikkodi]

What is preferred for Oracle databases?

[davey23uk]

if one was better than the other, then the other wouldnt exist.

They are both good, depends what your nheeds are - do you understand the differences?

[chikkodi]

Thanks for the quick reply. To be honest, I dont know what the differences are. I would guess, at the very basic, my main interest would be how easy it is to take snapshots of prod db and restore it to test (on the same box or diff server). Can you tell me a good point to start looking at this? There is too much info on the web..

[marist89]

It's relatively easy, but SAN and NAS don't come into play either way. True, SAN and NAS have technology that let you break mirrors and get a snapshot of your data, but so do a lot of other storage devices.

[BV1963]

SAN storage attached to the server via switch and HBA .
NAS storage is mounted on the server via another server , almost like NFS.
Obviously for the system with the high perfromance requirements and expectation SAN is a must. Otherwise NAS will do.

[davey23uk]

and what evidence do you have that NAS is bad for performance?

[stmontgo]

your enterprise storage admin is the weakest link - trust no one Mulder . SANE SAN is must read

[hacketta1]

To the OP, just checking you realise this: Oracle only support certain NAS devices: http://www.oracle.com/technology/dep...ndors_nfs.html

[BV1963]

I could do fancy testging to prove it, but here is the very simple one:

Try to create a large datafile (above 4Gb) on both systems keeping everything else the same and you will see the difference. It is not unusual to have 10-15Mb per seconde transfer rate on NAS and much high on SAN. If you can live with the slower IO go for NAS, it is cheaper. Otherwise stick with the SAN

[davey23uk]

creating a tablespace isnt a very good indicator of whether NAS or SAN is good enough for your app. It proves nothing