Scaling Oracle with pNFS: Improving database efficiency for scale-out architecture

Oracle with Redhat Enterprise Linux over traditional NFSv3 has been driving a lot of mission critical business on NetApp storage controllers successfully over the years. With Parallel Network file system(pNFS) that is part of NFS4.1, has immensely revolutionized the IO path by isolating meta-data, data and control communications between the client and the server unlike traditional NFS. RHEL6.2 and NetApp’s scale-out architecture in Data Ontap 8.1 being the first pNFS client and server implementation respectively that is production ready. Oracle databases can definitely benefit from the scalabilty and direct data access to the database files. pNFS would provide more resiliency in load-balancing the database workload seamlessly and improve the manageabilty when Oracle database is stored on a NetApp controller with tiered storage within a cluster namespace. Solution around Oracle on RHEL6.2 and NetApp controller would further validate the efficiency of the database over pNFS and its co-existance with other versions of NFS concurrently.

Learning Objectives

pNFS support for files in RHEL6.2 and Data ONTAP 8.1
Benefits of Oracle with pNFS and NetApp Cluster-Mode