SAN Storage for Database Servers

You can have the fastest CPU and terabytes of RAM, but if storage can’t handle the I/O load, your database will be slow. Fibre Channel SAN is the enterprise standard.

IOPS¶

Oracle generates random I/O. 15K RPM SAS: 180 IOPS, SSD: 5–50K+. For 3,000 IOPS you need 24 drives in RAID 10. Plan for 150 percent.

RAID for Oracle¶

Data files: RAID 10. Redo logs: RAID 1 on a separate disk group. Backup: RAID 5/6.

ASM¶

Oracle ASM for production — automatic striping, mirroring, rebalancing. ext4 on LVM for dev/test.

Monitoring¶

iostat: await under 10 ms, %util under 80 percent. SAN management console for per-LUN metrics.

Summary¶

Measure IOPS before sizing. RAID 10 for data. Monitor latency. Plan for growth.