When businesses or new initiatives begin, may companies often forget to build their database infrastructures efficiently. They either over build or under build. Both of which waste resources and often never give adequate solutions in the long run. So why NAS? We should like NAS because SANs are just too complex and expensive. We have to worry about all the high-level management tasks evolved. ASM, ODM, Host-based volume management and file system administration, RAW, CFS, Ext3/UFS, fiber channel, LUN maintenance, and zoning are just time consuming and difficult to understand and maintain. And of course SANs are more expensive for fiber channel HBAs and switches. And let's not forget the expense of hiring real administrators.

NAS is just too simple and inexpensive: Simple provisioning and management because it is as easy as plugging in an Ethernet cable, there is one unified storage pool to manage, and an easy, online capacity to grow. Oracle administration is improved because there is one solution for all of the Oracle data, the model/implementation is the same with RAC or non-RAC Oracle installations, and just because shared storage simplifies database provisioning. A reduced cost of storage is noticed because NAS uses inexpensive Ethernet NICs and switches and because NAS can have an amortized savings experience over many database servers.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. This webcast will give you a nice introduction to HP's next generation of scalable NAS architecture. Honestly, if you are the type that just will never think NAS has a future, I would encourage you to take a look at this Webcast. Somewhere around 15 minutes into the video is when it gets interesting and some really cool technology.

Go to: Cut the cost and complexity of database storage with NAS for Oracle

But don't worry, there isn't really much talk about Oracle