This post was written by Balamurugan B and Krishna Kamal Kapa, Engineer in Global Solutions Engineering

With Dell's Latest acquisition of Compellent Storage, customers would love to migrate their existing Oracle databases to the new Dell Compellent Array which provides best availability, scalability, manageability and performance.

Oracle Database can be better optimized with Dell Compellent using the below features

  • Storage Virtualizationeliminates “hot spots” by spreading read/write operations across all available drives so database requests are processed in parallel
  • Thin Provisioningallows users to create any size storage volumes for Oracle databases upfront yet only consume capacity as data is written to disk
  • Oracle’s Auto-Extend Clause works in unison with Thin Provisioning to dynamically extend datafiles as the tablespace grows without database downtime
  • Automated Tiered Storagedynamically migrates inactive data to the optimal tier, freeing up high-performance drives for active Oracle datafiles
  • Dell Compellent storage enhances Oracle ASM to fine-tune data placement and load balancing for high availability
  • Space-efficient Replays (snapshots)support Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) to streamline database backup and recovery
  • Boot from SAN minimizes the capacity and bandwidth required to clone Oracle databases

Now let’s discuss about Oracle Database Storage Migration, this is a process of transferring database and its critical components from one storage array to another. If you are organized about it, the Data migration can be a simple and a painless process. However, there are challenges one may face during the implementation like application availability, storage and hardware requirements.

We have number of oracle tools available for data migration like transportable table space, Data pump, export, import etc., but each of these tools has its own limitations in terms of Database availability/up time and Pre-allocation of Storage space.

The intent of this blog is to provide detailed information on infrastructure requirements at each level of migration and steps to achieve a safe and orderly transition to Dell Compellent Array with negligible downtime and efforts.

Below picture helps you to understand the different phases of storage migration for a 3 node Oracle RAC Database:

 

image01

 

Storage Migration process involves discovering the new Compellent volumes on the host, migrating the Clusterware components like Oracle Cluster Registry, Voting Disks and finally the actual Datato the newly discovered storage volumes.

You can find the detailed steps involved in storage migration here

Once the Storage migration is successful, you can remove the old storage infrastructure.

References :

Configure the compellent arrays with "http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/enterprise-solutions/w/oracle_solutions/1318.aspx"

Discover the compellent volumes on to the hosts using "http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/enterprise-solutions/w/oracle_solutions/1421.aspx"

Want to know more, you can reach us @ Balamurugan_b@dell.com , @ krishna_kapa@dell.com any feedback is appreciated.