Who's In Charge Here Anyways?

As DBAs we have all seen it, heck, probably done it. We call over to the server administrators for more space for our database files and sometime later we get it. We have no idea how it is configured, where it is located or if it will contend with existing file placements. All of the files we own are located in some magic land, let’s call it SAN Land, where everything is always load balanced, there are no hot spots and nothing ever contends with anything else. I think it is located right next to Lake Woebegone.

The SAN as a blackbox technology has been a boon and a bane to Oracle administrators. We know how things should be set up but when we try to pass along this information to the SAN administrator we hear the usual replies about how we have to co-exist with the other users and it is just not possible to configure things just for us. Well, those days have ended.

How about space that doesn’t have to be configured with an eye towards contention due to head movement or contention caused by block placement? How about freedom from hotspots and all the other problems which plague disk based technology? Even better, how about storage that can be locally managed? Impossible? Am I in a fantasy land somewhere?

Nope, not a fantasy land, welcome to the year 2010. How about 225 to 450 gigabytes of low latency storage that is locally controlled and doesn’t depend on disks, and better yet, can usually be purchased and installed with little pushback from system or LAN administrators? The RamSan-10 or RamSan-20 provide 225-450 gigabytes of high speed – low latency SLC flash memory based storage that plugs into a full size PCIe slot in the server and looks like another disk drive, but looks are deceiving.

As a “database accelerator” for a single server database that hooks directly into the server and doesn’t require any fibre channel, NFS, iSCSI or SAS connection, PCIe storage bypasses many of the management headaches associated with standard SAN technology. Due to the RamSans not being dependent on a physical device, 100% of the storage capacity can be utilized, no need to worry about short-stroking, striping or mirroring to get better performance. At a price of between 8-20K USD these solutions also fall easily within the signatory purchase powers of most department heads.

So shake off the fetters of the SAN world and step into the 21^st century! Deliver 5 times the performance of standard SAN technologies to your database that you control locally.