Neptune vs Saturn

DBAs Are From Saturn, and Storage Admins Are From Neptune 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.

Why Storage Admins Frustrate Us Let’s face it, DBAs and Storage Admins don’t always see eye-to-eye. You’ve just come out of the hundredth meeting with your Application Owner and Business Analyst to justify your architecture recommendations and finally you’re 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, he’ll probably just disappear for 2 weeks only to return with some totally different, complicated LUN scheme that costs too much! It’s that kind of frustration that drove Larry Ellison to build ASM, right? vs Most DBAs have a common set of frustrations when dealing with their Storage Admins: • Why is provisioning LUNs so slow? • Why is the storage design so complicated? • Why does the storage architecture ultimately fail 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 Admin’s 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.

What you say, and Inside the mind of a Storage Admin what your Storage Admin hears: Your Storage Admin is constantly reminded that his Flash Tier infrastructure spend is the single biggest expenditure DBA says: I need 10K IOPs across IT. Every year, he needs to show up with ways on everything. to make his services more agile, higher performing Slow Disk Tier and more resilient; while driving down the cost. Storage Admin hears: I have Like his peers, he’s adopted some form of an IT-as- champagne tastes and a a-Service Model deploying a Private Cloud. This Budweiser budget. however, forces him to manage a highly complex, Slowest Disk Tier mixed workload environment. DBA says: Let’s keep it simple Even more frustrating, the incumbent storage and RAID-10 everything. technology, the hybrid disk array, wasn’t designed to Storage Admin hears: I’m economically deliver the maximum I/O, resiliency and pretty sure a bigger number protection requirements for all provisioned storage. is better. Hybrid arrays require Storage Admins to manually “create” performance service tiers by selective combinations of striping, I/O balancing, RAID sets, snapshots and replication. DBA says: I need 2 full Your simple request But the necessary snapshots every 15 mins for for a primary LUN architecture will reporting and analytics. may look like this: look like this: Storage Admin hears: All your 15K disk are now belong to us. Fast VPN Fast VPN Fast VPN Flash Tier DBA says: I’m not sure how SOE1 TempDB1 TempDB2 SQL OS Data Data Server DSS Log OLTP1 much this app will grow, SOE2 DATA FC Redo TempDB1 TempDB2 TempDB1 SQL so let’s be conservative. Log Log Data Server Tier FRA SQL DSS Server TempDB1 DATA TEMP OLTP 1 OLTP 2 OLTP2 Log Log Log Storage Admin hears: I’m DATA DATA going to ask for a re-layout SATA before your vacation to Hawaii! Tier Oracle SQL Server OLTP SQL Server DSS

Unfortunately, that’s not where this story ends. The complicated There has to be a better way architecture your Storage Admin has created will now need to be managed! So, let’s take a moment to recap. DBAs are looking for consistent performance, resilience, and high availability. You’re 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 | Latency Spike 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 wouldn’t you try it? When your application starts seeing latency spikes 9 months All-Flash Arrays solve the DBA - Storage Admin conflict from now, your Storage Admin only needs to refer to his handy by delivering: schema and spreadsheets to sort out what esoteric process • 100’s of thousands of IOPs with consistent sub-millisecond latency. associated with another application, is conflicting with your • Cost per GB, at or below the cost of disk. Compression, application. This kind of trouble-shooting takes hours or days, de-duplication and sophisticated management of consumer if it happens at all. That’s why Storage Admins always ask you grade flash have dropped the price of All-Flash Arrays to at or to buy storage when performance dips. It’s too hard to fix the below the cost of disk arrays. existing storage! • Consistent, predictable performance for all database workloads. Worse yet, what if you have a catastrophic failure in your • Better data resilience and protection. stack? This is when you realize that your application’s storage • Better data protection. The best All-Flash Arrays will offer architecture didn’t allow for granular enough snapshots space-optimized snapshots that support tighter RPOs and RTOs because the storage wasn’t available or the cost was too high. without the overhead. Again, no need to reduce protection to Now a lengthy rebuild from logs is required. While you didn’t cut costs! lose data, your RTO is blown. Send Pure Storage your AWR report, and we’ll schedule a free consultation with our Oracle performance experts to talk about how Pure Storage’s 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?).

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, we’ve found patterns of how the most effective Storage Admins and DBAs align and solve infrastructure problems. If you’re a Storage Admin, we wrote this eBook for you!

DBAs are impossible to please, so why bother? You’re 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. You’ve 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 you’ll get there with some creative caching and tiering so it won’t break the bank. vs 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 you’ve 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 DBA’s 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.

What you say, and Inside the mind of a DBA what your DBA hears: An Oracle DBA lives and dies by the performance and availability of enterprise Storage Admin says: With the data. The DBA guards data as a lioness guards her cubs. Anything that threatens current storage infrastructure, the smooth functioning of an Oracle DBA’s systems is to be treated with extreme I can’t support RAID 10. We just prejudice. Unfortunately, that sometimes includes the storage infrastructure and the don’t have enough capacity. people who manage it. Only the very best will do for an Oracle database – RAID DBA hears: You are an enemy 10, sub millisecond response time, oceans of capacity – these are a few of a DBA’s of efficient data management. favorite things. If high availability and performance are bacon and Bon Jovi (things you love) then Storage Admin says: To downtime and high latency are Brussels sprouts and waiting in line at the post office – support your IOPS and latency to be eliminated at all cost. requirements, we are going to While you would love to shower them with flash cache, short-stroked LUNs, and need performance HDD’s and snapshots – you can’t because that is way too expensive. And they just don’t cache. We don’t have the budget understand that trade-off. this quarter. What’s more, DBAs view your storage maintenance windows with suspicion. DBA hears: I am over- They remember that time in 2011 when the maintenance window spilled over into complicating your simple production hours due to a faulty .config file. request for a moderate amount of performance storage, u i m d e m despite the fact that you fund much of my storage budget. h i Storage Admin says: We have IT w gh a storage maintenance window ol next week. Unfortunately we may have to bring down the DB Performance database for a couple of hours. DBA hears: ALERT! CODE RED! Shoot first, ask questions later. 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.”

There has to be a better way Storage Admins are constantly battling to find a balance between What if you could have everything that’s on this list? Pure supporting the needs of the business and staying within budget Storage’s FlashArray can help dramatically simplify your storage – often by designing tiered storage architectures. Yet, we have infrastructure, deliver sub millisecond latencies and be completely to deal with managing this increasingly complex environment, non-disruptive to the rest of the infrastructure. And all for a price while trying to be agile and move at speeds that are dictated by that is less than the cost of traditional arrays. the business. When we aren’t agile or cheap, we can’t be good partners to the business. 20 If you had a wish list, it would probably look a little like this: Pure Storage 10 Tier 1 100% Flash ••••• $ Legacy Disk ••• •• DB Latency (ms) 0 1 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 Time All-Flash Arrays deliver: Don’t take our word for it, try it out for yourselves. Join forces • A simple, easy way to manage storage infrastructure, without with your DBA to do a POC on the FlashArray for their Oracle tiers/tears! database. It could be the start of a beautiful relationship. • Consistent, predictable performance across all workloads. • A resilient, highly available storage platform that is non- disruptive to the rest of the data center’s infrastructure. • Reduction in overall spend on storage infrastructure, without compromising on any of the above.

Pure Storage. A better way. Now you are in a better space.