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This layer provides shared storage requirements for the Application and the Database tiers in the Oracle EBS architecture.
PowerFlex storage is a software-defined storage that combines all the storage resources across multiple servers and creates a high-performance, sharable pool of block storage (Block Cluster Pool). The PowerFlex Block Cluster Pool provides high performance and high availability block-based shared storage volumes for the Oracle database tier. Through the SDC storage client, all database nodes have the read and write access to these shared storage volumes. By creating the corresponding Oracle ASM disk groups on these shared storage volumes, these PowerFlex storage nodes provide all the storage needed for the Oracle RAC database files and the Oracle Grid Infrastructure such as the Oracle Cluster Registry (OCR), voting disks, and Grid Infrastructure Management Repository (GIMR)
Starting with PowerFlex 4.x, PowerFlex file nodes provide high performance, low-latency file services to applications. They provide all features and protocols support expected in a modern enterprise NAS storage. File nodes are deployed as separate, dedicated nodes on top of the SDS storage nodes. They provide the compute capabilities (CPU and memory) and consume storage from the PowerFlex block (SDS) storage nodes (File Cluster Pool). File nodes can scale independently of the PowerFlex storage nodes. This gives Oracle EBS customers the flexibility to independently scale the file-based shared storage for the application tier such as the “APPL_TOP” directory. Both the Block Cluster Pool and the File Cluster Pool on the SDS storage nodes can use the same pool of hard drives underneath, thus providing greater resource usage efficiency.
Note: For smaller deployments or for those running PowerFlex 3.6+, users can deploy separate PowerFlex SDC nodes instead of PowerFlex File Nodes. The local storage on these separate SDC nodes can serve as an NFS share for storing the “APPL_TOP” contents. However, NFS would have to be manually installed on these SDC nodes. In addition to NFS environment being pre-integrated, it is recommended to use PowerFlex File Nodes because they provide higher level of fault tolerance for NFS storage, with the ability to withstand entire storage node failure.