The best of all worlds: Dell EMC Ready Solution for Oracle (Part III)

In the last two blogs viz. Part I and Part II, I was talking about the oracle solution that was running on the DELLEMC VMAX storage along with many other components. In this blog, I will talk about one more oracle solution that is running on the top of the XtremIO X2 storage, though there are some variations in the use cases here. Before we delve into the details of the solution architecture, I would like to emphasize here that the taxonomy got changed this time from “Ready Bundle” to “Ready Solution”. Now, let’s look into architecture diagram as depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Ready Solutions for Oracle with XtremIO X2 and Data Protection

In this solution, the Oracle databases operated in three different mode. The first is the bare metal 2-node RAC database running on two PowerEdge R940 servers and the second consists of two standalone snapshot databases running on R740 standalone server created from the first category via XtremIO XVC (XtremIO Virtual Copies) while the third one is comprised of two standalone virtualized databases of 11g and 12c versions. The whole architecture depicted in Figure 1 is supported by 2 X-Bricks XtremIO X2 cluster array and backed up by the Data Domain 6300 appliance. The DELLEMC engineers have run a rigorous and diversified testing over this oracle solution (as shown in Figure 1) and generated good results. We will discuss about the results in this blog along with the details of different use cases performed in four tests as depicted in Figure 2. In the first test the objective is to create a simple, standalone 2-node RAC database on a bare metal infrastructure with 2 X-Bricks. This architecture is then enhanced to accommodate 2 snapshot databases (created via XVC from Test 1) and finally two different standalone virtualized databases are created one of 11g Rel 2 version & the other database is of 12c . The complete details of the test case 1, 2, 3 and 4 are depicted in Figure 2.

Figure 2:  The details of the test case 1, 2, 3 and 4

Following the best practices of running oracle database on XtremIO platform, DELLEMC engineers generated good performance numbers which are depicted in Figure 3.

Figure 3: The performance numbers for Test 1,3,4

From Figure 3, we have observed that as we increase the workload in terms of OLTP and OLAP and in terms of different virtualized environments of 11g and 12c databases, the databases achieved higher IOPS and transactions per second (TPS) with sub-.85 milliseconds latencies. This is a spectacular performance keeping in view we used only 36 SSDs .

Summary

The Dell EMC Ready Solution for Oracle is an awesome solution with greater agility, operational efficiencies and resiliency in a single solution. Ready solutions for Oracle features like scalability, performance, consolidation, automation, centralized management and protection.  So far as technical virtues of this solution is concerned, it has been internally tested which delivers fantastic results in terms of higher IOPS, transactions per second (TPS), bandwidth, scalability, consolidation along with consistent sub-millisecond (less than .85 milliseconds) latencies even after adding enhanced OLTP and OLAP workloads in a bare metal and virtualized environments. It helps companies to reduce typical company’s financial costs like its CAPEX and OPEX . Additionally, the Dell EMC R740/R940 Servers can sustain multiple and larger workloads with less CPU and memory utilization. When we talk of Dell EMC XtremIO X2 storage we observed that it has generated 131K+ IOPS (in-house) along with higher throughput and less than .85 millisecond latencies for mixed workloads. Repurposing copies generated by the XtremIO Virtual Copies(XVC) helps in 1.8X  storage space savings due to the inline deduplication and compression features of XtremIO X2 arrays. In summary, the Dell EMC Ready solution for Oracle is a winning, integrated, validated, flexible and configurable solution in all aspects as it combines the best of all the worlds of a typical data center. In the next blog, we will continue discussing the good features of this solution which involves the mixed workload options using both Oracle and Sql Server databases.