DB over NFS (was Re: Postgres over SAN/iSCSI)

On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 10:33:26AM -0700, Bill Pennington wrote:
> Thanks Adi, I am probably just being paranoid but running *anything* of NFS
> gives me the creeps, but I had bad experiences with a goofball NFS server in
> my past that have probably scarred me too much.

Our Netapp was/is certainly not "goofball" and we were prepared to pay enough
to make sure it wasn't, so maybe that was/is the saving grace :-)

> How much data where you storing? We are at close to 3TB today and estimating
> 10-50TB by the end of 2009, assuming we continue with our current data
> retention policies.

In 2002 we had about 100GB in our Postgresql db and a single table with 14
million rows IIRC and growing about 2 million rows a month.

In Oracle now I have 1+ TB in data alone (3+ TB in tablespaces) and growing
about 100GB per month. I have over 20TB in total Netapp storage for Oracle
including backups, exports and replication at a remote site (all for just one
project currently).

I don't think the space usage should be your concern, but rather IO esp. if
you are doing analytics/data warehousing esp. involving full table scans. In
many ways running it over NFS is just like DAS except with advantages (easily
bring up a new server, expand the volume size and in the case of Netapp use
snapshots to make RO copies in <1 second, and flexclone to make rw copies from
those snapshots without using twice the amount of space -- basically a clone
only uses as much room as the changed blocks)

and no, I don't get a cut from Netapp (though I should) :-)

Adi