We are developing and deploying a data warehouse based on Oracle 11g EE with partitioning on RHEL5 64bit for a client.
The total storage required would be around 4TB of usable space.
I have been reading about balanced hardware configuration of data warehouses and that storage throughput is essential to the performance of a data warehouse; storage should be spec'd for sequential throughput not capacity, stripe and mirror everything.
Our customer is very keen on using their SAN (NetApp) for a number of reasons: e.g. centrally managed and backed up and they have already spent a lot of money on it.
It seems to me that even a relatively small number of local disks could have better throughput than a SAN e.g.
16 x 10k RPM 600GB SFF disks = 9600 GB raw = 4800 GB usable space using RAID-10
If each disk can produce 60MB/s throughput the aggregate throughput is 8 x 60 = 480 MB/s
My question: Is it possible to get >400MB/s sequential throughput to a single Oracle database host connected to a SAN?
I realize I'll need at least a 4Gbps or greater connection to the SAN. I see no theoretical reason why a SAN couldn't deliver this speed given enough disks.
Can a SAN deliver data at "data warehouse" rates in practice (at least 400MB/s)? Does anyone see these speeds in the real world? Perhaps there is some limit that I am not aware of that prevents seeing these kinds of rates to a single host via a SAN.
We have lots of Oracle and Red Hat experience but we are not that familiar with SAN. We are a small company and don't have one internally.