Oracle and Informix I/O profiling - 1

This is an interesting subject in database and storage industry. Today number of I/O auto optimization techniques are evolving such as Oracle ASM at the database front and Dynamic/Thin provisioning at the storage front. Manual I/O designing and optimization for database are already a legacy subject?

Sometimes, we have to cope with the legacy. So I start listing the possible physical storage structure of Oracle and Informix.

Trick is the design of LUN (or volume)? Size, RAID level, Number of spindles … for different I/O profiles of database structures. Theory knowledge on database product and experience may come in handy here.

List of High-End/Enterprise storage systems

One of my customers asked me a list of enterprise storage systems. Interestingly I could list only five :-) This is the full list.

• 3PAR InServ T400
• 3PAR InServ T800
• EMC Symmetrix DMX-4
• EMC Symmetrix V-Max
• HDS USP VM
• HDS USP V
• HP StorageWorks XP20000
• HP StorageWorks XP24000
• IBM DS8100 Turbo
• IBM DS8300 Turbo
• IBM DS8700 Turbo
• NetApp (FAS Series) FAS6040
• NetApp (FAS Series) FAS6080
• Sun StorageTek 9985V
• Sun StorageTek 9990V

IT Infrastructure Solution Evaluation

Selecting an IT infrastructure solution is always a challenge. I was listing some of the possible criteria to differentiate solutions. I have seen many such solution selections, some of them are decided on personal/organizational relationships, political reasons :-). Whichever the key decision criteria, some technical backing is mandatory. May be this list (I will keep on adding/modifying it) would help someone in some way.

1. System Requirements and Compliance – Answers are binary type – (Yes/No)

Sample criteria:-

• Need a certified Unix OS?
• Need to comply with regulations for digital records (Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Securities and Exchange Commission rules 17a-3 and 17a-4 and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA))?
• Need to comply with "EU Code of Conduct for Data Centers”?
• Need to comply with "TIA-942 Datacenter Infrastructure Standard”?

2. Solution Architecture Features – Answers are descriptive – (% marks can be given)

Sample criteria:-

• How far solution logically tired?
• How far solution physically tired?
• How far horizontally scalable?
• How far vertically scalable?
• How far inter-dependencies between building blocks (servers, VMs, storage arrays/trays ...etc) avoided?
• How easy to manage the solution?
• How much control and tracking enabled for the solution?

3. Solution Acceptance (How Well-known, proven)

Sample criteria:-

• How many professionals/customers approved/implemented?
• Presence of similar solution implementations?

Typical model of a Data Center - local mid/enterprise customer

Above diagram is a typical model of a data center - local mid/enterprise customer.

Local SMB customers developing data center for production and DR sites are indecisive with the network design. Once they decide routers, switches and cabling arrangements, it is hard to change the network architecture here and there.

When it comes to a new installation, customer needs to plan the correct place for the new infrastructure in his data center model.

Installation engineer has three repetitive network related questions for any customer.

- What is your Management network IPs for the new servers/storage?

- What is your User Access LAN IPs (hostnames, gateways, network ...etc) ?

- What is your Private Data (inter server/nodes) network IPs (cluster interconnects …etc)?

Essentially, any data center should have above three Ethernet networks with required expandability, isolation and access control (security).

This is one of the simple facts in data center architecting and there are many more such as edge/core design, end of the rack / top of the rack and list goes on.