Why is it difficult for DBAs and Storage Admins to work together? From our conversations with numerous IT teams, we see patterns of miscommunication and misaligned goals between DBAs and Storage Admins. The common thread is a lack of understanding of the challenges faced by the other team. We wrote this eBook to help DBAs better understand the challenges of the Storage Admin, and to propose a solution to reduce conflicting goals between DBAs and Storage Admins.

DBAs Are From Saturn, and Storage Admins Are From Neptune

Why Storage Admins Frustrate UsLets face it, DBAs and Storage Admins dont always see eye-to-eye. Youve just come out of the hundredth meeting with your Application Owner and Business Analyst to justify your architecture recommendations and finally youre on the same page. The last thing you need is to convince some hardware geek down the hall why you need RAID-10, replication, or a 100GB cache for your LUNs.

After your meeting, hell probably just disappear for 2 weeks only to return with some totally different, complicated LUN scheme that costs too much! Its that kind of frustration that drove Larry Ellison to build ASM, right?

Most DBAs have a common set of frustrations when dealing with their Storage Admins: WhyisprovisioningLUNssoslow?

Whyisthestoragedesignsocomplicated?

Whydoesthestoragearchitectureultimatelyfail to provide the consistent performance and availability that it promises?

To get answers and to solve this problem, you need to get into your Storage Admins head. You need to understand the rationale behind why they approach database storage requests the way they do.

Finally you need to understand that there is a better way.

vs

Inside the mind of a Storage Admin

Your Storage Admin is constantly reminded that his infrastructure spend is the single biggest expenditure across IT. Every year, he needs to show up with ways to make his services more agile, higher performing and more resilient; while driving down the cost. Like his peers, hes adopted some form of an IT-as-a-Service Model deploying a Private Cloud. This however, forces him to manage a highly complex, mixed workload environment.

Even more frustrating, the incumbent storage technology, the hybrid disk array, wasnt designed to economically deliver the maximum I/O, resiliency and protection requirements for all provisioned storage. Hybrid arrays require Storage Admins to manually create performance service tiers by selective combinations of striping, I/O balancing, RAID sets, snapshots and replication.

Flash Tier

Slow Disk Tier

Slowest Disk Tier

FlashTier

FCTier

SATATier

Fast VPN Fast VPN Fast VPN

Oracle SQL Server OLTP SQL Server DSS

SOE1

SOE2

FRA

DATA

OS

Redo

TEMP

TempDB1Data

TempDB1Log

OLTP 1Log

TempDB2Data

TempDB2Log

OLTP 2Log

DSS Log

TempDB1Data

TempDB1Log

SQLServerOLTP1DATA

SQLServerOLTP2DATA

SQLServer

DSSDATA

Your simple request for a primary LUN may look like this:

But the necessary architecture will

look like this:

What you say, and what your Storage Admin hears:

DBA says: I need 10K IOPs on everything.

Storage Admin hears: I have champagne tastes and a Budweiser budget.

DBA says: Lets keep it simple and RAID-10 everything.

Storage Admin hears: Im pretty sure a bigger number is better.

DBA says: I need 2 full snapshots every 15 mins for reporting and analytics.

Storage Admin hears: All your 15K disk are now belong to us.

DBA says: Im not sure how much this app will grow, so lets be conservative.

Storage Admin hears: Im going to ask for a re-layout before your vacation to Hawaii!

Unfortunately, thats not where this story ends. The complicated architecture your Storage Admin has created will now need to be managed!

When your application starts seeing latency spikes 9 months from now, your Storage Admin only needs to refer to his handy schema and spreadsheets to sort out what esoteric process associated with another application, is conflicting with your application. This kind of trouble-shooting takes hours or days, if it happens at all. Thats why Storage Admins always ask you to buy storage when performance dips. Its too hard to fix the existing storage!

Worse yet, what if you have a catastrophic failure in your stack? This is when you realize that your applications storage architecture didnt allow for granular enough snapshots because the storage wasnt available or the cost was too high. Now a lengthy rebuild from logs is required. While you didnt lose data, your RTO is blown.

There has to be a better waySo, lets take a moment to recap. DBAs are looking for consistent performance, resilience, and high availability. Youre looking for a way to get this at a reasonable cost. You care about complexity because when something goes wrong, you expect your Storage Admin to be able to restore performance, maintain uptime or recover data quickly.

What if you could get the performance, resilience, and high availability without sacrificing simplicity? What if this cost the same or less than your existing storage? Why wouldnt you try it?

All-Flash Arrays solve the DBA - Storage Admin conflict by delivering: 100softhousandsofIOPswithconsistentsub-millisecondlatency.

CostperGB,atorbelowthecostofdisk.Compression, de-duplication and sophisticated management of consumer grade flash have dropped the price of All-Flash Arrays to at or below the cost of disk arrays.

Consistent,predictableperformanceforalldatabaseworkloads.

Betterdataresilienceandprotection.

Betterdataprotection.ThebestAll-FlashArrayswillofferspace-optimized snapshots that support tighter RPOs and RTOs without the overhead. Again, no need to reduce protection to cut costs!

Send Pure Storage your AWR report, and well schedule a free consultation with our Oracle performance experts to talk about how Pure Storages FlashArray can improve the performance and resiliency of your Oracle environment while actually reducing the cost of your storage architecture (that should make the Storage Admins happy, right?).

Latency Spike

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

||

||

||

||

||

|

Storage Admins are from Neptune,and DBAs are from Saturn

Why is the relationship with your DBA so hard to get right? How do you collaborate with someone who is used to working autonomously, and with specialized infrastructure? From our work with the most successful IT teams in the industry, weve found patterns of how the most effective Storage Admins and DBAs align and solve infrastructure problems. If youre a Storage Admin, we wrote this eBook for you!

vs

DBAs are impossible to please, so why bother?Youre in a meeting to talk about a new order processing application that requires back-end storage, which, as the storage admin, you will be responsible for setting up and maintaining. Youve had conversations with the DBA about the storage requirements for the project, which at the time, were reasonable the new application will need to support 1000 users, driving 20,000 transactions per minute at peak load. You and the DBA settled on the storage required to support this 5 TB, 5,000 IOPS, 5 ms latency and RAID-5 protection. A complicated proposition, but youll get there with some creative caching and tiering so it wont break the bank.

Six weeks later, the other shoe drops. Surprise, surprise, the requirements have totally changed. The project will now be required to support 5,000 users driving 100,000 transactions per minute. The storage requirements have sky rocketed 20 TB, 20,000 IOPS, 0.5 ms latency and RAID 10. The storage architecture youve just spent weeks putting together is completely useless. And there is no budget to purchase the latest and greatest gear

So how can you solve the problem? First, you need to get into your DBAs head to understand where these requirements and last-minute requests are coming from. What is most important to him/her?

Finally you need to understand that there is a better way.

Inside the mind of a DBA

An Oracle DBA lives and dies by the performance and availability of enterprise data. The DBA guards data as a lioness guards her cubs. Anything that threatens the smooth functioning of an Oracle DBAs systems is to be treated with extreme prejudice. Unfortunately, that sometimes includes the storage infrastructure and the people who manage it. Only the very best will do for an Oracle database RAID 10, sub millisecond response time, oceans of capacity these are a few of a DBAs favorite things.

If high availability and performance are bacon and Bon Jovi (things you love) then downtime and high latency are Brussels sprouts and waiting in line at the post office to be eliminated at all cost.

While you would love to shower them with flash cache, short-stroked LUNs, and snapshots you cant because that is way too expensive. And they just dont understand that trade-off.

Whats more, DBAs view your storage maintenance windows with suspicion. They remember that time in 2011 when the maintenance window spilled over into production hours due to a faulty .config file.

They remember 2011 because nothing is worse than the database being down and the CIO suddenly knows their name as that guy responsible for the outage.

low

m

edium high

DB Performance

IT

What you say, and what your DBA hears:

Storage Admin says: With the current storage infrastructure, I cant support RAID 10. We just dont have enough capacity.

DBA hears: You are an enemy of efficient data management.

Storage Admin says: To support your IOPS and latency requirements, we are going to need performance HDDs and cache. We dont have the budget this quarter.

DBA hears: I am over-complicating your simple request for a moderate amount of performance storage, despite the fact that you fund much of my storage budget.

Storage Admin says: We have a storage maintenance window next week. Unfortunately we may have to bring down the database for a couple of hours.

DBA hears: ALERT! CODE RED! Shoot first, ask questions later.

There has to be a better wayStorage Admins are constantly battling to find a balance between supporting the needs of the business and staying within budget often by designing tiered storage architectures. Yet, we have to deal with managing this increasingly complex environment, while trying to be agile and move at speeds that are dictated by the business. When we arent agile or cheap, we cant be good partners to the business.

If you had a wish list, it would probably look a little like this:

All-Flash Arrays deliver: Asimple,easywaytomanagestorageinfrastructure,without

tiers/tears!

Consistent,predictableperformanceacrossallworkloads.

Aresilient,highlyavailablestorageplatformthatisnon-disruptive to the rest of the data centers infrastructure.

Reductioninoverallspendonstorageinfrastructure,withoutcompromising on any of the above.

What if you could have everything thats on this list? Pure Storages FlashArray can help dramatically simplify your storage infrastructure, deliver sub millisecond latencies and be completely non-disruptive to the rest of the infrastructure. And all for a price that is less than the cost of traditional arrays.

Dont take our word for it, try it out for yourselves. Join forces with your DBA to do a POC on the FlashArray for their Oracle database. It could be the start of a beautiful relationship.

Tier 1Legacy Disk

Pure Storage 100% Flash

Time

DB

Lat

ency

(ms)

20

10

0 1 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40

$

Pure Storage.A better way.

Now you are in a better space.