Experience and Lessons learnt from running high availability databases on Network Attached Storage

The Database and Engineering Services Group of CERN's Information Technology Department provides the Oracle based Central Data Base services used in many activities at CERN. In order to provide High Availability and ease management for those services, a NAS (Network Attached Storage) based infrastructure has been set up. It runs several instances of the Oracle RAC (Real Application Cluster) using NFS as share disk space for RAC purposes and Data hosting. It is composed of two private LAN's to provide access to the NAS file servers and Oracle RAC interconnect, both using network bonding. NAS nodes are configured in partnership to prevent having single points of failure and to provide automatic NAS fail-over. This presentation describes that infrastructure and gives some advice on how to automate its management and setup using a Fabric Management framework such as Quattor. It also covers aspects related with NAS Performance and Monitoring as well Data Backup and Archive of such facility using already existing infrastructure at CERN.