Oracle Database Appliance - Practical Oracle Database Appliance - page 5

controllers, which are connected to an onboard SAS expander. Each SAS expander, in turn, is connected to 12 of the
hard disks in the ODA. Oracle uses Linux multipathing to avoid disk-path failures. Solid-state drives (SSD) have been
added for redo to overcome rotating disk latency, because the controller of the rotating disk has no cache. Disk sizing
on the ODA depends on many factors, including the version of the ODA software that is running on the appliance.
Table 1-2 shows the various disk configurations and configuration options that are supported on the ODA.

Table 1-2. ODA Disk Configurations

Configuration
Option

Disk Group Type/Redundancy Backup Type Space Available (GB) Software Version

Supported

1 DATA HIGH External 3200 All versions

1 RECO HIGH External 488 All versions

1 REDO HIGH None 91 All versions

2 DATA HIGH Local 1600 All versions

2 RECO HIGH Local 2088 All versions

2 REDO HIGH None 91 All versions

3 DATA NORMAL External 4800 2.4 and above

3 RECO NORMAL External 733 2.4 and above

3 REDO HIGH External 91 2.4 and above

4 DATA NORMAL Local 2400 2.4 and above

4 RECO NORMAL Local 3133 2.4 and above

4 REDO NORMAL None 91 2.4 and above

Table 1-2 illustrates various disk configuration options supported by the ODA. As you can see, the space has
approximately 4TB usable due to all disk groups being triple-mirrored (high redundancy) in configuration options 1
and 2. Depending on which configuration you chose, you will have more space in DATA or RECO disk groups.
Oracle Database Appliance 2.4 introduced the option to allow mirrored (normal redundancy) disk groups
for DATA and RECO. This is highlighted in Table 1-2 as configuration options 3 and 4. This was done primarily
to allow customers the choice of space based on the environment that the ODA is being deployed. Typically, the
recommendation is to deploy mirroring (normal redundancy) on development/test systems.
The ODA runs Oracle Enterprise Linux OS with support only for the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) as of
software version 2.2. The following is a snapshot of ODA software version 2.6:

Linux oda01 2.6.32-300.32.5.el5uek #1 SMP Wed Oct 31 22:06:21 PDT 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Enterprise Linux Enterprise Linux Server release 5.8 (Carthage)

Looking at the ODA box from the outside, there are a lot of connections that need to be made. Figure 1-4 points
out the various connections, which are then described in Table 1-3 . Oracle also provides an easy scheme for setup.
The setup poster is shown in Figure 1-5 .