If you are reading this it means that you have successfully followed the trail of breadcrumbs to my new blogging home, part of the new Scale Abilities website. Thank you for following!
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Wow, it's been a while since I wrote a post, sorry about that! I thought that I would take a brief break from the technical postings and espouse some opinion on something that has been bothering me for a while - 'Best Practices.'
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In my last blog entry I alluded to perhaps not being all that happy about Fibre Channel. Well, it's true. I have been having a love/hate relationship with Fibre Channel for the last ten years or so, and we have now decided to get a divorce. I just can't stand it any more!
OK, this one might be contentious, but what the heck - somebody has to say it. Let's start with a question:
Raise your hand if you have a feeling, even a slight one, that storage arrays suck? Read the full article
I was recently looking into a storage-related performance problem at a customer site. The system was an Oracle 10.2.0.4/SLES 9 Linux system, Fibre Channel attached to an EMC DMX storage array. The DMX was replicated to a DR site using SRDF/S.
The problem was only really visible during the overnight batch runs, so AWR reports were the main source of information in diagnosis. In this case, they were more than sufficient, showing clear wait spikes for 'free buffer waits' and 'log file parallel write' during the problematic period. They were quite impressive, too - sixteen second latencies for some of the writes. Read the full article
