Improving Oracle Performance with New Dell 4 Socket Servers

Deploying Oracle on a PowerEdge Server presents various challenges, typical of intricate software and hardware integrations. As servers age, they become increasingly expensive to maintain and can have detrimental effects on business productivity. This is primarily due to the heightened demand for IT personnel's time and the heightened risk of unscheduled downtime.

In the case of older servers hosting virtualized Oracle® Database applications, they might struggle to keep up with growing usage demands. This can result in slower operations that, for example, dissuade customers from browsing a website for products and completing online transactions. Aging hardware is also more susceptible to data loss or corruption, potential security vulnerabilities, and elevated maintenance and repair expenses.

One effective solution to address these issues is migrating Oracle Database workloads from older servers to newer ones, such as the 16th Generation Dell™ PowerEdge™ R960 featuring 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. This upgrade not only mitigates the aforementioned concerns but also opens doors to further IT enhancements and facilitates the achievement of business objectives. It can lead to improved customer responsiveness and quicker time-to-market.

Additionally, transitioning workloads from virtualized environments to bare metal solutions has the potential to significantly enhance transactional database performance, particularly for databases that come with high-performance service-level agreements (SLAs).

We recently submitted one of the new Dell PowerEdge R960’s to Principled Technologies for testing with an Oracle database 19c and compared the results to previous generations. The performance exceeded even our own lofty expectations. As the graph below shows, the R960 was able to process almost 8 times more transactions than the PowerEdge R920 and over double the transactions of the previous generation PowerEdge R940.

For more details read the full report here: Improving Oracle Database performance: Moving to Dell PowerEdge R960 servers with Intel processors | Dell Technologies Info Hub

When refreshing platforms it is critical to consider these performance characteristics and other common top 10 concerns such as:

1. Compatibility Issues: Ensuring that the version of Oracle Database you want to deploy is compatible with the specific PowerEdge server hardware, operating system, and other software components can be a significant challenge. Compatibility matrices provided by Oracle and Dell (the manufacturer of PowerEdge servers) need to be thoroughly reviewed.
2. Hardware Selection: Selecting the right PowerEdge server model with the appropriate CPU, memory, storage, and networking capabilities to meet the performance and scalability requirements of Oracle can be tricky. Overestimating or underestimating these requirements can lead to performance bottlenecks or wasted resources.
3. Operating System Configuration: Configuring the operating system (typically, a Linux distribution like Oracle Linux or Red Hat Enterprise Linux) to meet Oracle's specific requirements can be complex. This includes setting kernel parameters, file system configurations, and installing necessary packages.
4. Storage Configuration: Setting up storage correctly is critical for Oracle databases. Customers need to configure RAID levels, partitioning, and file systems optimally. Ensuring high I/O throughput and low latency is essential for database performance.
5. Network Configuration: Proper network configuration, including setting up the network stack and configuring firewalls, is important for database security and accessibility.
6. Oracle Database Configuration: Configuring Oracle Database itself, including memory allocation, database parameters, and storage management, requires a deep understanding of Oracle's architecture and best practices. Misconfigurations can lead to poor performance and stability issues.
7. Backup and Recovery Strategy: Developing a robust backup and recovery strategy is crucial to protect the database against data loss. This includes configuring Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) and ensuring that backups are performed regularly and can be restored successfully.
8. High Availability and Disaster Recovery: Implementing high availability and disaster recovery solutions, such as Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) or Data Guard, can be complex and requires careful planning and testing.
9. Licensing and Compliance: Managing Oracle licenses and ensuring compliance with Oracle's licensing policies can be challenging, especially in virtualized or clustered environments.
10. Performance Tuning: Continuously monitoring and tuning the Oracle database and the underlying PowerEdge server to optimize performance can be an ongoing challenge. This includes identifying and addressing performance bottlenecks and ensuring that the hardware is used efficiently.

 To address these challenges, it is often advisable for customers to work with experienced system administrators, database administrators, and consultants who have expertise in both Oracle and PowerEdge server deployments. Additionally, staying informed about the latest updates, patches, and best practices from Oracle and Dell can help mitigate potential issues all of which can be found by partnering with Dell Technologies to take advantage of these performance enhancements found within the PowerEdge R960.

Author: Seamus Jones

Director, Server Technical Marketing Engineering