Home > Workload Solutions > Oracle > White Papers > Solution Insight: Oracle E-Business Suite on Dell PowerFlex Infrastructure > Architectural overview
The Application Tier has multiple application servers with each running one or more Oracle EBS processes. The clients connect to the load balancer which in turn distributes connections to the application servers. The application servers communicate with the database tier which contains Oracle Database 19c with Real Application Clusters technology (RAC).
This architecture is highly flexible and scalable which can be easily adapted to the ever-changing business requirements or priorities. Application servers can be added for increased performance or reduced by consolidating onto larger server to simplify administration and lower cost. Using Dell PowerFlex hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) technology, system resources can be allocated or reassigned as needed for the application tier.
In the application tier, the application server consists of the APPL_TOP directory which contains the core technology files and directories. In a multitier application deployment, instead of configuring the APPL_TOP file system individually on each application server, Oracle recommends configuring a shared file system for all application servers. This shared file system approach reduces maintenance overheads and shortens updating downtimes.
The Database Tier can remain either on the Dell PowerFlex two-layer architecture or Storage-only architecture to avoid any potential Oracle database licensing issues.
In a PowerFlex two-layer architecture, the compute node Storage Data Client (SDC) is the consumer of storage. It provides front-end volume access to applications and file system. The storage node Storage Data Server (SDS) is the supplier of storage. It abstracts local storage, maintains storage pools, and presents volumes to the SDCs. The PowerFlex manager provides IT Operational Management (ITOM) and lifecycle management (LCM) for the entire infrastructure. In the two-layer approach, the SDS and the SDC components are on a separate node chassis. The SDS component provides storage resources, and the SDC component provides compute resources. This approach enables customers to only license the Oracle database on the SDC component.
In a PowerFlex storage-only architecture, PowerFlex only provides storage resources. The benefit to this approach is to enable customers to use their existing hardware for Oracle database servers and leverage the PowerFlex high performance and scalable storage. This can be a starting point for customers who may expand to a two-layer architecture in the future or during the Oracle EBS upgrade process.