Using external storage for enterprise grade deployments

Hello everyone, In this post I am going to share one of my experience with respect to usage of SAN storage in enterprise grade deployment of Oracle SOA Suite. However, this concept  is common across any of the enterprise grade deployment.

Once I got an opportunity to do the production grade deployment of oracle soa suite 12c where I was asked regarding the SAN (Storage Area network) storage usage. I wasn't aware about the different storages and their requirement. I did some research and came to know that storage is a-one of the most critical component in production deployment. This is why because we have different kind of data and different needs of accessing the same, e.g. we can have media files, image files, backup files, system files and the archived files etc. Below table gives the high level overview of different storage requirements and available options -

S. No	Requirement to store	Recommended Storage
1	System files , boot volume, application    configurations (disk volume)	Block Storage
2	Unstructured data such as music, images,   and videos, Backup and log files, Large sets   of historical data	Object Storage
3	Archived files (a varient of object storage)	Archive Storage
4	Word document, excel, pdf, text	File Storage

So, In this way I came to know that Block Storage correctly fits in to my requirement because I will have following data with respect to SOA suite deployment which is available on my local disk storage-

• Domain Configuration (DOMAIN_HOME)
• Middleware Home (MW_HOME)

Both data is critical to the product because while running SOA suite, it takes the config files from these locations followed by metadata from database. 

Now the question arises why should I go for the same, I do have my machine (VM or BareMetal) and I can keep my all the files over there only?

The answer is -

• Reliability of the data and faster recovery during disaster or machine failure i.e. Block storage is located in a remote chassis connected via low latency high bandwidth connection and mounted to the VM/BM. 
• So, in case of  machine failure, the data can be mounted on a different machine and services can be stated quickly resulting in less downtime of services. 
• Another point is that SAN is much faster than NAS(Network attached storage) , so while choosing my block storage I would go for SAN only.
• This is called block storage because it keeps the data in fix size block (eg. 64) subject to the accessibility of OS.

So by this way, I got understanding of different storage devices and their requirements. I will write other post on object, archive and file storage shortly.

Thanks!