NAS and SAN - How oracle could shape the future of storage technologies

Oracle is today's leading database being deployed in many many shops. Oracle in turn is one of the prime drivers for storage in a company. Without the need for a database and in turn leading to highly available databases, I doubt that the SAN technologies as seen today would be the same without Oracle. With RAC on 11g, Oracle is crossing new boundaries and again re-defining storage technologies.

I had been working for some time in putting together a simple, cost-effective and high performing RAC solution. Though the basic concept of RAC is good, getting it all to work together in a simple efficient manner is not an easy task. There are many components and for me, the SAN was the biggest pain area.

Having a strong background in Storage Technologies, I quickly came to the conclusion that in order to make it easy to deploy and maintain, one would need to replace the SAN and associated (Cluster Filesystem, Cluster Volume Manager, Clustering and such) with a simpler technology. Here comes oracle with ASM and CRS (adapted from Digital/Compaq Clusterware) to make things simpler. While the goal of ASM is admirable, it is far from a perfect solution. For instance, taking backups is a pain using RMAN. One would prefer Snapshot (either SAN or Flashsnap), but Snapshot would not work as ASM uses no visible filesystem.

The way ASM stripes files can become a bottleneck when you have a large number of disks in a single disk group. So here we go again, having to plan the disk groups, lun sizing etc etc. So for an Enterprise customer with significant amount of data, ASM is simply another bottleneck. The future is towards simpler and easier technologies to support.

Luckily Oracle comes to the rescue with support for NFS. NFS has been supported even in 9i (with some really large scale implementations), however 10g RAC is a lot more implement/support friendly. Until now, NFS was used only by dot-coms or companies who could not afford SAN's. NFS used up CPU (system time), could not be easily load-balanced in a reliable way and was simply slower than SAN's.

With the advent of 10g Ethernet, TCP offload Engines (TOE), Multiple Symmetric Active NAS heads, it looks to me that finally NAS is on par or even better than the SAN.

• Oracle supports NFS out of the box as a file-system (either cluster or otherwise).
  
• NAS is cheap, easy to deploy and maintain. (since it uses existing Ethernet infrastructure)
• NFS is a cluster filesystem with a proven track record and inbuilt support within the OS.
  
• NAS devices give the same kind of cloning/snapshot technology as the SAN for easy backups.
  
• NFS v3 is really fast when configured correctly with well defined tunables. No need to search for hidden parameters etc to increase your payload.
  
• 10g Ethernet, jumbo frames and TOE cards give blazing performance with low system overhead.
• One can easily bond/multipath multiple cards at the host for superior performance (transparent to the application).
• Now, NAS heads offer multiple active controllers with transparent failover.
• NFS v3 supports direct i/o and oracle supports async i/o on NFS.
  
• No fancy volume managers or filesystems required to support NFS. Open Standard.
• It is platform independent and with proper planning well scalable.
• Easy for system operators and database operators to understand and use.

Now oracle has gone a further step in embedding the NFS client directly into the oracle kernel in 11g. It has also incorporated load balancing with multiple paths to the NAS head.

While the same amount of attention needs to go into a designing a NAS solution for Oracle as a SAN (Raid configuration, lun layout, cache, controllers, failover etc), at least it is a lot simpler to deploy than a SAN and the associated baggage.

I believe that if Oracle 11g with NFS is a success, than we are going to see considerable movement from SAN to NAS. Obviously the existing SAN infrastructure would simply become a backend for NAS heads, still we can considerably reduce cost and complexity of the infrastructure.