In article ,
Faeandar wrote:

My experience is that applications that claim they need block access
are incorrect.

That's only trivially true, in that applications don't generally
require block access. What you're supplying block access to is usually
the OS which is in turn interacting with the application via something
like Veritas or OCFS. Certain NFS implementations are approved for use
with Oracle, but there's a performance degradation over a direct access
san device. I don't actually see how you could build a petabyte data
warehouse on top of NFS. IMHO it's just too inefficient.

And Oracle *recommends* using NFS with Oracle RAC, so clustered Oracle
on NAS is preferred.

Do you have a reference for that? I don't remember that as true
as of 10g.


The only things I can think of that *need* _shared_ block level
storage are clustered file systems. Other that that, everything I've
ever run across will work on NAS.

A large mail spool won't. In fact, anything that depends on
reliable file locking will almost certainly break over an NFS link.
I'm aware of the improvements in V4; they still don't support clustered
file systems well.