Home > Workload Solutions > Oracle > Best Practices > Intel-Based Oracle Best Practices on Dell PowerEdge R740 and PowerMax 2000 > Storage Best Practices > Day One Best Practices > PowerMax: Storage Directors
The PowerMax 2000 provides multiple front-end connections used for connectivity from the storage array to the PowerEdge servers. In this best practice, we increase the number of front-end connections to optimize storage performance.
Category | PowerMax Storage |
Product | PowerMax front-end connections |
Type of best practice | Performance Optimization |
Day and value | Day 1, Highly recommended |
Overview
PowerMax storage arrays use bricks that enable customers to add more power, performance, and capacity to an existing array. Each PowerMax brick has two engine directors. Directors support multiple functions including front-end I/O modules. The front-end I/O modules provide connectivity to the array using various interfaces including Fibre Channel SCSI, Fibre Channel NVMe, iSCSI, and others.
There are four front-end I/O modules per director. In the baseline configuration, two of the four total directors were used. The following table shows that all four front-end I/O modules were used on director 2 and two front-end modules were used on director 4. The two other front-end modules on director 4 were reserved for replication. Each front-end module was a 32 Gbps Fibre Channel connection and in the baseline connection a total of six were used.
Table 1: Directors and ports used
Director number | Port number | Connected | HBA number and port |
1 | 1 |
|
|
2 |
|
| |
3 |
|
| |
4 |
|
| |
2 | 1 | Connected | HBA 1, Port 1 |
2 | Connected | HBA 1, Port 2 | |
3 | Connected | HBA 2, Port 3 | |
4 | Connected | HBA 2, Port 4 | |
3 | 1 |
|
|
2 |
|
| |
3 |
|
| |
4 |
|
| |
4 | 1 | Connected | HBA 1, Port 1 |
2 | Connected | HBA 1, Port 2 | |
3 | Reserved for replication |
| |
4 | Reserved for replication |
|
For this best practice two additional directors were added (1 and 3) with all the front-end I/O modules used for a total of eight more connections to the server. The following table shows the two directors and eight ports that were added (highlighted in darker gray):
Table 2: Additional directors added
Director Number | Port number | Connected | HBA Number and Port |
1 | 1 | Connected | HBA 1, Port 1 |
2 | Connected | HBA 1, Port 2 | |
3 | Connected | HBA 2, Port 3 | |
4 | Connected | HBA 2, Port 4 | |
2 | 1 | Connected | HBA 1, Port 1 |
2 | Connected | HBA 1, Port 2 | |
3 | Connected | HBA 2, Port 3 | |
4 | Connected | HBA 2, Port 4 | |
3 | 1 | Connected | HBA 1, Port 1 |
2 | Connected | HBA 1, Port 2 | |
3 | Connected | HBA 2, Port 3 | |
4 | Connected | HBA 2, Port 4 | |
4 | 1 | Connected | HBA 1, Port 1 |
2 | Connected | HBA 1, Port 2 | |
3 | Reserved for replication |
| |
4 | Reserved for replication |
|
With the additional directors and front-end ports, this best practice showed the greatest improvement of all the storage recommendations. Doubling the connections to the database server provided substantial improvements.
Recommendation
Adding additional directors and front-end I/O ports enabled more connections between the database servers and the PowerMax 2000 storage array. Test findings showed substantial improvements for:
There were also significant improvements for Server CPU utilization and DB File Sequential Read.
Both TPC-C metrics NOPM and TPM showed a substantial improvement: the number of orders completed and transactions processed increased significantly. Correspondingly, array IOPS also increased significantly.
Both DB File Sequential Read and Log File Parallel Read Write times showed a substantial decrease, indicating faster response times.
Overall, the best practice of adding PowerMax directors and front-end I/O modules can optimize performance by providing more communication pathways between the database server and storage. The recommendation is to implement this best practice as a Day 1 activity, as it is a highly recommended configuration that optimizes database performance.
Implementation Steps
In a typical SAN configuration, the server HBA ports (initiators) and the storage director front-end ports are linked to a SAN switch. A software process in the SAN switch creates zones, pairing the server HBA ports (initiators) and the storage director ports (targets).
The following outlines the implementation steps:
Figure 1: I/O paths for each server
In order to fully utilize these 14 physical I/O paths, in Unisphere for PowerMax we created a storage port group that includes all the 14 front-end ports:
Figure 2: Creating a storage port group
We created mask views to assign the storage groups to hosts and port groups.
Click Masking Views > Create Masking View. For example, to create the mask view SG_DB1_MV, we used the following:
Figure 3: Creating a masking view
Additional Resources
This best practice was referenced from the Deployment Best Practices for Oracle Database with Dell EMC PowerMax.