Great story. I build a lot of Oracle clusters and have to deal with "certified DBAs" that have "opinions" based on experience back when 9GB hard drives were a

Great story. I build a lot of Oracle clusters and have to deal with "certified DBAs" that have "opinions" based on experience back when 9GB hard drives were a large size. Luckily, there are great tools out there like ORION (Oracle I/O Numbers Tool) that let me simulate an Oracle workload which give me real quantitative data that I can use to prove a particular configuration is non-optimal. I've had to prove and disprove configurations before, and personally I think that if you're building any storage for database, you better benchmark it. Too many sysadmins just take the default settings on their storage and might only get 10% of the potential out of it. I've seen a lot of systems that were setup in wtf ways. For example, having 4 HBAs in a system and all data is flowing down a single path, since the sysadmin never bothered to install multipath drivers or set path preference. This happens _all_ the time. Check out my blog for some of my latest database storage benchmarking: http://sanarchitect.blogspot.com http://sanarchitect.blogspot.com