Comments on: Collaborate 08 – Day 4 – The Final Day

By: Arnoud Roth

Arnoud Roth — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:56:25 +0000

Kurt, Thank you so much for your kind comments. I had a great time talking with you about our mutual expertise. You know where to find me when you have any questions, as well as I know how to find you;-)
Hopefully we’ll talk soon. Would be nice to do some work together.

By: Arnoud Roth

Arnoud Roth — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:53:50 +0000

Del, Thanks for your comments. If you feel comfortable with ASM, go ahead, and do not throw it away when you find it beneficial to your environment. Never change a winning team! Arnoud

By: Kurt Forshee

Kurt Forshee — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:16:35 +0000

Arnoud,
I’m so glad we had a chance to talk in Denver — it was a little stressful being there presenting for my first time. Thanks for the very kind words about my presentation — you have sold me on the non-essential ASM component, and I’ll be sure to include that moving forward. As far as SAN vs. NAS, the redundant FC on several small servers should place the SAN out of budget all by itself, but you are right about not being able to get a ship to change course in such narrow channel.
Can’t wait to catch up to you again — let me know if there are any projects we can work together on; I’m sure it would be a blast.
Also, my friend from over there (Nagesh Danturti) was at Nuon before he went to Aon; he did a fantastic job on their 6-node RAC in Atlanta data-center and I still use a lot of his documentation for all aspects of my install and configuration.
Cheers,
Kurt

By: Del Albrecht

Del Albrecht — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 02:48:06 +0000

Arnoud, I was at the RAC session as well and you made some well-placed and pertinent comments during the session. I agree for the most part with your comments above, particularly your remarks regarding more smaller machines. (Although Kurt implied that with proper node affinity, etc. this could largely be overcome). You are right on target in saying that you don’t want to walk in and recommend the client rip out all their Symmetrix’es. I have used both NAS and SAN and, like Kurt, I am leaning toward NAS these days, but to some extent it is a religious issue.

I have encountered resistance to ASM for the exact reasons you describe, but to me the benefits of ASM far outweigh the cost (i.e., pain). The I/O load balancing alone is worth it to me, and combined with OATM removes much of the headache of managing EBS databases. (This is probably religious too, though.)

Excellent summary of the session!