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GFS, OCFS, and GPFS - Which Filesystem for Oracle?
amani asks: "My company has a Oracle 9i RAC database running on a Sun cluster. In 6 months we are looking to replace the cluster with either a Linux or an AIX solution that will involve SAN storage. I see that their are a variety of filesystems for Oracle and Linux. Sistina (Red Hat) has the GFS, Oracle has the OCFS, and IBM has GPFS. Does anyone know the pros and cons of each of these filesystems ,and which one would be better for a continuously growing database?"
Have you looked at a Veritas Cluster? (VCS) The company I work for uses it and we have found it to be very stable.
Until there is a high quality, well maintained, open source clustered file system along the professional level of reiserfs, I'd say nothing out there is worth using. They are all either 1) closed source and by definition poorly maintained and near non-usable with open source operating systems, 2) aren't *real* clustering file systems or 3) so ungodly expensive only fortune 500 companies can justify the expense.
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9i rac can be dangerous to your health.
As someone involved in building and architecting ludicrously sized realtime transaction processing systems, I can honestly tell you that the answer is "whatever".
If you have lots more updates than accesses, you need your redo logs etc on RAW devices, no filesystem required, these will be your biggest bottleneck. The rest, well, just go for a decent hardware RAID implementation, since software RAID is a joke.
If you have lots more accesses than updates then it's your RAM which will probably make the real impact.
And at the end of the day, if you're looking at advice, and you're sporting a cheque in your pocket - ask the vendors to tell you which one you should buy! Ask the tricky questions and put their answers in your contract so that they pay you if they lie
I know - it's a nice dream.
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I run a 500 MB Oracle DB for SAP on top of AIX/JFS/SSA disks. It runs fine. Everything is very stable. Performance is good. SSA is a IBM SAN-like disk technology. SSA is pricey, however is very mature. With AIX 5.2 you can add/delete/move/remove FS/disks/SSA trays with all the applications running. Avoid JFS2, still not mature enough to be stable. Create Oracle datafiles up to 2 GB.
Hey when did IBM steal GPFs from Microsoft? Personally the name alone in that one would make me stear wide and far from it. Of course that could just be IBMs awful marketing department at work again. It might even be better than the others. Yes this post adds nothing to the conversation except a little humor. Moderate as you feel you should.
In Republican America phones tap you.
Um.. perhaps call your Oracle support people. If your company is at all sizable, they probably have support contracts with the companies that provide them their mission-critical software? And their professional services/technical engineering people would surely be the best people to ask.
> IBM has GPFS I'd stay away from a product named after a Microsoft bug.
Despite all the wisecracks about the name, our sentimental favorite should be GPFS because of a certain well known geek who works for the filesystem group at IBM Almaden.
The real question is, why are you migrating your hardware? Is it because you want to save some money on infrastructure in the short term? Is it because you're thinking long-term and are worried about the viability of the Sun platform? Is it because performance and/or reliability aren't good enough with your present system? Is it because your company has been acquired and your new owners are in bed with IBM? Or is it because Linux is the buzzword of the day and your boss insists you use it? Forgive my nosiness, but they question you are asking isn't really a tech question that has a straightforward answer. What is the outcome you are looking for? A wise engineer chooses his tools according to the job at hand, not the other way round.
Figure out what you want to accomplish, then figure out what you need to do that. It's easy enough to try all three and see...
depends on how well your projected growth is known.
If you are going from Solaris to A.N.Other Unix-like O/S be prepared for a learning curve. Doesn't matter what the O/S is it will require retraining - adds to costs.
Also how write heavy is you App? You'll need to watch the O/S - Oracle tuning as they (esp Oracle) will need specific tuning, remember having to set alsort of new stuff for Oracle 9 and Solaris?#
Best advice is get your self a decent Oracle DB-admin, even for a short term contract as this will save you lots of money in the meduim term. If you can find one who understands/admins Unix as well you're 1/2 way there.
As with anything Oracle there are so many ways of doinf things and so many knobs to tune it can be quite difficult to optimise, the Filesystem type and O/S tuning are normally fairly low down the list of things to do..
Check out Oracle's web site. they are very specific about WHICH linux distributions and WHICH apps/tools that are supported under OCFS. (http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs/files/support ed/)
Impliction ? Anything not listed MIGHT corrupt the files !
I run one of the 99 other 9i RACs in the world. I hate it. OCFS is slow, difficult to mount, load, and install. Plus it consumes all the resources in the system. The Oracle guys don't know anything else so they like it. But as the system admin I seem to be constantly fixing Oracle which the Oracle guys can't. So I ask you, what good are they if they can't even fix their own stuff. I also find that Oracle is a hack. Even the DBAs say this. Why do they use java to install stuff. What's wrong with a good shell script? I know java is platform independent. But that doesn't matter if the java installer won't even run. Better yet. What if the DBAs actually know how to install or compile stuff. Why is this asking to much.