What in the world is a Storage Frame ?

Recently, I was asked for information about storage frame of the largest Production server in our environment.  There were two questions:

1. What is the storage frame name ?

2. What is the storage frame type ?

I spoke to some storage guys to understand what was the information that was being sought, and they told me that:

Storage Frame Type could be SAN, NAS or local disk

Storage Frame Name could be Symmetrix DMX3000 or other SAN products.

So Storage Frame means the hardware which is being used for storage, it may be:

1. A Storage Area Network (SAN)

2. A Network Attached Storage (NAS) device

3. Local disk attached to server

While I was googling for information about storage frames I found an article on Alejandro Vargas Oracle Blog about Database location on a storage frame.  This is what he says:

Every production environment needs to be built according to this standard:

      The formula for database location on the frame is 20%-40%-20%-20%:

• 20% of the disk located on the external cylinder is the best performing area of the frame, to be used by online redo logs, undo segments, temp segments and most accessed database files
• 40% near the external cylinder is a good performing area, to be used by all other database files
• Next 20% is a slow performing area and should not be used for database files, except parameter files, archived logs, software install
• Last 20% correspond to the inner cylinder, is the slowest performing area and should not be used for database files at all.

Lun's to be used by the database needs to be mapped to assure that the database is located in the most performing areas of your frame.