Databases: UK Oracle User Group SANs and HBAs

At the recent UK Oracle User Groups, there was lots of discussion around SAN performance and HBAs (Host Bus Adapters). 

Perhaps I've not concidered SAN performance enough and I've never heard of HBAs. So this post gives a quick overview:

In computer hardware, a host controller, host adapter, or host bus adapter (HBA) connects a host system (the computer) to other network and storage devices. The terms are primarily used to refer to devices for connecting SCSI, Fibre Channel and eSATA devices, but devices for connecting to IDE,Ethernet, FireWire, USB and other systems may also be called host adapters. Recently, the advent ofiSCSI has brought about Ethernet HBAs, which are different from Ethernet NICs in that they include hardware iSCSI-dedicated TCP Offload Engines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_Bus_Adapter

I found that Emulex are partnering Oracle, providing Virtual HBA technology:

"Emulex is working closely with Oracle to deliver industry-first capabilities for enterprise-class data centers, such as data integrity, support for Virtual HBA technology and 8Gb/s Fibre Channel SANs," Mike Smith, executive vice president, worldwide marketing, Emulex Corp. "Leveraging Emulex 8Gb/s HBAs, customers can utilize twice the performance of today's products, providing the I/O scalability necessary to support increased numbers of applications running on Oracle VM-based virtualized servers, which helps reduce management, procurement, power and cooling costs."

http://www.oracle.com/technologies/virtualization/partners.html

Lastly the following (SQL Server) blog post, is about tuning your HBA. This post gives a flavour of what DBA and System Admins should be concidering when working with HBAs:

Tuning your SAN: Too much HBA Queue Depth?

Modifying the “HBA Queue Depth” is a performance tuning tip for servers that are connected to Storage Area Networks (SAN’s).  A Host Bus Adapter (HBA) is the storage equivalent of a network card and the Queue Depth parameter controls how much data is allowed to be “in flight” on the storage network from that card.

http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/christian/archive/2009/01/12/tuning-your-san-too-much-hba-queue-depth.aspx