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