Re: PostgreSQL NetApp and NFS

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 8:32 PM, Chris Hoover <revoohc(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> I just found out that my company is planning on migrating my databases from
> our current ISCSI storage solution to NetApps connected via NFS. I knew
> about the NetApp migration, but always assumed (and shame on me) that I
> would have direct attachments to the servers.

It is also possible to present block devices from NetApp over iSCSI or FC
(I am not sure about licensing model though). You get all the goodies
like thin provisioning (only non-zero blocks are allocated), snapshots and
all, but you see it as a block device. Works fine.

It is also worth to mention that NetApp utilizes somewhat "copy on write"
write strategy -- so whenever you modify a block, new version of the block
is written on its WAFL filesystem. In practical terms it is quite resilient to
random writes (and that read performance is not stellar ;)).

I didn't try putting database on NFS mount directly, but I know NetApp
advertises that such setups are being used with Oracle database
(and allegedly Oracle website's databases are on such setup).
So I would feel quite safe with such a setup.

Oh, and don't forget to set rsize and wsize to 8K-32K (test and write here
what gives best performance!).

Regards,
Dawid