FATA drives in EVA6400 and Oracle DB

[NiKoGoIcO]

Is it suitable to use an EVA6400 with 96TB of FATA drives for Oracle DB. The EVA6400 will be used during 8 month for census purpose. The DB will increse about 3TB per week and all are images and metadata. After census process have finished there will be only queries to the DB (reads)and no writes at all.

We are considering FATA drives becouse of customer´s limited budget and the amount of TB required.

thanks
Nicolas

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Nicolas,

If the EVA explicitly supports this drive type, it is fine to use it for this purpose. If the drive is not supported by the EVA6400, do not use them.

SEP

[NiKoGoIcO]

thanks for answering.

The FATA drive is supported (1TB FATA drive), but I was wondering if in terms of performance is going to be any issue. Someone told me that FATA drives, in case of failure, last much more time than FC disks in rebuild the disk group having impact over the performance of the EVA. is that true?

Is there any document of EVA, type of disk used and Oracle Best Practice Guide?

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Performance could be an issue.

Issues that impact that:

rpm speed of the drive.

Raid level you choose. Choosing Raid 5 for a heavy write database can slow performance, though the disk array makers are getting better at mitigating this issue.

The more intense the write environment the bigger the danger of problems.

If your customer can afford better drives, they should go for it, if not, you take the risk.

SEP

[AnthonySN]

We have an EVA6400 with both 450 GB fc and 1TB fata drives and connected to blade servers having OS RHEL5.2 and db as mqsql.
the fc luns are used for online data and when the fc(online) luns are full they move the data to the fata(nearline) disks.
yes this application is also used to store huge images.

[AnthonySN]

>>correction db is mysql.

also would like to mention that yes the fata drives are slow. you need not worry about the performance during a rebuild , it happens in the background.

[Gordon Sjodin]

The FATA drive are rated at a much lower duty cycle. You will see alot of disk failures if you put a heavy load on them.

http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1272038920830+28353475&threadId=1067417

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Posted:

The FATA drive are rated at a much lower duty cycle. You will see alot of disk failures if you put a heavy load on them.
>>>>

The mean time between disk failures is still pretty long on these disks.

The EVA in RAID 5 provides protection against individual disk failure. I would have a couple of spares on site to avoid data loss.

SEP

[Gordon Sjodin]

MTBF is rated at a very low duty cycle on these disks-- probably about 30%. Once you increase the duty cycle MTBF goes out the window.