SaneSAN2010

Wow, it’s been a while since I wrote a post, sorry about that! I thought that I would take a brief break from the technical postings and espouse some opinion on something that has been bothering me for a while – ‘Best Practices.’ Best Practices have been around a long time, and started with very [...]

In my last blog entry I alluded to perhaps not being all that happy about Fibre Channel. Well, it’s true. I have been having a love/hate relationship with Fibre Channel for the last ten years or so, and we have now decided to get a divorce. I just can’t stand it any more! I first [...]

OK, this one might be contentious, but what the heck – somebody has to say it. Let’s start with a question: Raise your hand if you have a feeling, even a slight one, that storage arrays suck? Most DBAs and sysadmins that I speak to certainly have this feeling. They cannot understand why the performance [...]

I was recently looking into a storage-related performance problem at a customer site. The system was an Oracle 10.2.0.4/SLES 9 Linux system, Fibre Channel attached to an EMC DMX storage array. The DMX was replicated to a DR site using SRDF/S. The problem was only really visible during the overnight batch runs, so AWR reports [...]

This year at the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham, acceptance permitting, I will present the successor to my original Sane SAN whitepaper first penned in 2000. The initial paper was spectacularly well received, relatively speaking, mostly because disk storage at that time was very much a black box to DBAs and a great deal of mystique [...]

A couple of weeks ago I tweeted a projection that the $/GB for flash drives will meet the $/GB for hard drives within 3-4 years. It was more of a feeling based upon current pricing with Moore’s Law applied than a well researched statement, but it felt about right. I’ve since been thinking some more [...]