As you can see at the top of the blog, I haven’t been keeping up with my briefings for the past few weeks due to some personal issues.

Any update from the SAN vendors EMC/NetApp/HP/IBM regarding specialized hardware/firmware for database?

You mentioned Greenplum, which is a recent acquisition. Even ORACLE praised Netezza’s innovation during yesterday’s EXADATA CUSTOMER FORUM. It will have better adoption if such storage server module is coming from SAN vendor. Is there any progress in your radar?

Regards.

SAN is highly virtualized and easier to expand & manage. But DW storage is rarely shared with other applications once it grows beyond 40TB. To provide the same 8 GigaBytes/Sec or 40 GigaBytes/Sec to the database server layer, SAN will have to cost a lot more than those database-aware / database-optimized DAS storage solution.

Exadata V2 X2-8 is a compelling sample. The main vendor finally acknowledges the value of DAS solution for DW. Its storage server is very similar to Netezza’s FPGA I/O boards. SAN still manages 512-byte sectors, while Exadata deals with 1-MegaBytes blocks, and Netezza handles 3-Megabytes blocks respectively as the smallest storage unit. Imagine how much overhead the SAN’s ASIC chipset have to assemble the 0.5KB blocks into 16KB or 32KB db blocks and return them via the fiber fabric. Bying saving the $$$ on expensive hardware RAID controller, fiber switch, fiber HBA… we can actually invest some of the savings to SSD cache, Infiniband, and big-block-optimized compression modules; therefore the overall I/O can be greatly improved for less. The only disadvantage is that such optimization has not no industry standard, so the storage hardware is tightly coupled with vendor’s database engine, the only way to share these storage is via application or network layer API.

As the gap between DW demands and SAN cost is growing wider, the software-based and even hardware-based storage server for database engine will gain more ground. Netezza broke the ground, Oracle finally followed; Teradata and IBM are still SAN-based, but I won’t be surprised if Teradata pushes AMP down to dedicated I/O hardware with DAS.

You also can’t say that you’ll use enterprise infrastructure to deliver the performance without compromising performance service levels — after all, as soon as you use the Enterprise SAN, you’ve now got contention on fabric switches and any other shared components.

Well, I was starting to worry that I was completely out of step with the blogosphere, because finally a keynote presentation worth writing about and no-one seems keen, but I’ve only just noticed this quote in Pete Scott’s blog posting."For str…