NAS 1200s & Oracle 8

[Charbel Bou-eid]

Hello all,

I have ready many threads regarding HP NAS and I'm very happy with the amount of info I've got on HP NAS. But unfortunately, I haven't seen any thread on HP NAS 1200s & Oracle 8.

Below are the issues I'm facing:

Against my recommendation, my customer bought an HP NAS 1200s to use with his Oracle 8.1.6 backup database as he run out of space on his internal L2000 HDDs on which Oracle is installed. The NAS 1200s was successfully connected to the 2x L2000 Servers (on 100Mb/s via back-to-back cross-cables to eliminate network traffic congestion/collision if connected to the switches on the LAN) and 2 volumes (RAID 5) were created and each mounted in NFS on each of the 2x L2000 servers configured as NIS Master & Slave Servers.

If I try to copy a file from HP-UX 11.00 to the NAS, it takes some time but it completes it at the end (I have activated Write Cache in the Windows Server 2003 Appliance Endition's registry and used nfsonly command for the two NFS shares). I know this is usually due to the fact that the 100Mb/s cannot be effectively more than 40Mb/s and that the Software RAID-5 is also "taking part" in this slow copy process. BUT, my biggest concern is that when my customer tries to create a new empty Oracle datafile (just 10MB) from the svrmgrl prompt (actually I'm just a beginner in Oracle), it takes an indefinite time without giving back the prompt although we can see the newly created & completed file on the NAS 1200s when looking at its console.

I have tried to search for a possible reason and couldn't find any on HP sites, but I have found something related to one EMC Clarrion NAS which is behaving similar to our NAS 1200s and what this document propose as a turn-around is to create the empty datafile on the attached storage (Internal Disk or Disk Array), then move it to the NAS and create a symbolic link (ln –s) between the two file paths. We haven’t yet tried this, but I would be grateful if somebody tells me if he had this problem before on HP NAS and if the EMC “proposed” solution will work on HP NAS 1200s as I want to have a decisive answer for my customer by tomorrow max.

Your urgent and prompt help is highly appreciated.

Cheers,
C

[Charbel Bou-eid]

Hello,
Any reply? I promise you with lots of points.
BR,
Charbel

[Ashwin R_1]

Hi there,
not sure if my reply will help you as its a pretty late one. Anyway, here goes...

I have faced a similar problem while trying to create Oracle data files from an HP-UX server, over nfs, using a Windows Storage Server 2003 SFU3.0 share. The problem then was related to lock requests from the HP-UX not being granted by SFU.

Can you check the nfs logs on your NAS device and let me know if you see "LOCK DENIED" messages corresponding to requests from your nfs client ?
If you do find such messages I suggest you take a look at this link from Microsoft
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;328858

Thanks
Ashwin