Home > Storage > PowerFlex > White Papers > Dell APEX Block Storage for AWS: Oracle Database Deployment and Performance > Architecture using Amazon instance store (Local NVMe drives)
Figure 3 represents the Dell APEX Block Storage for AWS using Amazon instance store (native attached NVMe SSD drives).
The number of available AZs in a region varies. In this example, Dell APEX Block Storage for AWS is deployed on the US East (North Virginia) region with three AZs. A single VPC with public and private subnets is created on each AZ. There are six PowerFlex SDS instances of type i3en.12xlarge running across the AZs with Red Hat Enterprise Linux AMI. There is a single Fault Set assigned per AZ to maintain equal numbers of PowerFlex SDS instances in each Fault Set. The Fault Set provides balanced capacity and performance between the PowerFlex SDSs as capacity is expanded. The PowerFlex SDS instances that are deployed by Dell APEX Block Storage for AWS are backed by native NVMe SSD drives. The NVMe SSDs are locally attached at the Instance level. The native attached NVMe SSD drives are ephemeral storages. Instances that are powered off will have the NVMe devices wiped clean, in accordance with the AWS design (this does not include node reboots and rather an intentional stopping of the nodes). There are six PowerFlex SDS instances that are configured into a single protection domain. A single storage pool is created, using all the storage devices available within the protection domain.
PowerFlex maintains the user data in a mesh mirrored layout such that each piece of data has two copies (primary and secondary) stored on two different PowerFlex SDS instances. The copies are evenly distributed across the PowerFlex SDS instances, which enables the system to maintain data availability and high-performance if there is a failure of a storage device or PowerFlex SDS instance.
Figure 4 shows the PowerFlex SDS instances using Amazon instance store (NVMe SSDs):
The PowerFlex SDC is installed on each Amazon EC2 instance type c5n.9xlarge running on different AZs. The Oracle databases are run on c5n.9xlarge instance types within a private subnet. Amazon recommends allowing only application servers within the VPC or a Bastion host within the VPC to access the database instances.