[Linux-cluster] GFS + Oracle storage hardware suggestions?

[Matt Goebel]

I am in the process of specing out a high availability Oracle database
solution and need some advice from those of you experienced in doing this
as to what storage hardware to get.

The plan right now is to have 3 Oracle 9i or 10g nodes (2 failover)
running on Redhat Enterprise 3.5 or 4.1 with a shared filesystem for
Oracle via GFS (6.0 or 6.1 depending on which version of RHEL)  We'd also
like to use multipathing and 2 mirrored SANS of some sort.  The
application we will be running requires very very little in terms of
storage space, only ~3GB per year, per database.  DB load will also
probably not be that high.  Uptime is critical.  So for hardware I have
been looking into the following:

iSCSI SAN: I've tested a low end (nice price) EMC AX100i /w GFS 6.0 (using
GULM) and RHEL 3.5 (4.1 doesn't have iSCSI working yet).  Performance was
awful... 2.5-5 MB/s writes, 25-30 MB/s reads.  So it looks like iSCSI is
out of the question unless there is another hardware option that would
give me the performance I'd want?

Fibre Channel SAN: I've been trying to avoid using a FC solution if I can
because of cost but if it's what I need it's what I have to get.  Any
suggestions on this?  Are these reliable enough to safely use just one SAN
in a 99% uptime environment?  Any good entry/mid model's to look at?

AOE (Coraid.com):  This looks to be a perfect solution.. low cost and
potentially decent performance.  It's relatively new and I haven't heard
of anyone using it yet though.

There doesn't seem to be much out there to tell me what sort I can expect
out of these with GFS...  Any info would be helpful.