A PARTITION
Surprisingly (at least to me), the difference between a partition and an array is often misunderstood by
those who don??™t deal with storage as a regular job function. The result of that misunderstanding is often
???getting what you asked for??? rather than ???getting what you need.???
An array is a physical portion of a disk array that has been configured to use a certain number of
disks with whatever level of fault tolerance is required. The storage administrator (who could be the
same person as the server administrator, if you are using local drives) chooses which disks will participate
in the array and then sets a specific level for protection and redundancy.
At the operating-system level, the server administrator configures one or more partitions on the
newly constructed array. Each of these partitions is configured to use a specific file system, such as
FAT, NTFS, or FAT32. After the file system is specified, the drive is created, formatted, and made available
for use. Drive letters??”C:, D:, and so forth??”correspond to partitions.
As the DBA, you should be clear about what you??™re asking for when it comes to disk space.
Pages:
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440
441
442
443
444
445
446
447
448
449
450
451
452
453