Re: Postgres over SAN/iSCSI

On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 09:33:58AM -0700, Bill Pennington wrote:
> Does anyone have experience running Postgres and using an iSCSI SAN as
> storage? I am looking for options that let me grow storage capacity without
> downtime while maintaining a reasonable level of performance. iSCSI seems like
> it might work but I have 0 experience with the technology. Any comments or
> suggestions are greatly appreciated.

though not exactly answering your question, we (Zapatec) ran Postgres over NFS
(on a Netapp) for one of our products a few years ago. It worked well, though
GigE is the minimum network bw you'd want to consider (much less expensive now
than when we were doing it)

the Netapp allowed volumes to grow without downtime and both FreeBSD and
Postgres had no problems with that

there is a vast amount of literature (esp. from Netapp and Oracle) about
running databases over NFS and *much* of it is applicable to Postgres too
AFAICT -- I now run Oracle (and have run 10g RAC) over NFS to Netapp at a
sizable installation (Oracle was already here and there is a site license
hence not switching to Postgres :-) and have no problems to report about the
combination or running a db over NFS (other than flow control network
interface issues with Dell hardware!) and everything to recommend about it!

Adi