The Dell EMC PowerStore system is designed with a purpose-built, 2U, two-node Intel Xeon platform. The array is available in two different product models:
- PowerStore T—Theses models support multiple storage products. The platform starts with the PowerStore 1000T or 1000X model and scales up to the PowerStore 9000T or 9000X model. PowerStore T models are bare-metal, unified storage arrays that can service block, file, and vVol resources along with numerous data services and efficiencies. PowerStore T models are ideal for traditional and modern workloads such as relational databases.
- PowerStore X—These model appliances enable running applications directly on the appliance through the AppsON capability. A native VMware ESXi layer runs embedded applications alongside the PowerStore operating system, all in the form of VMs. This feature is in addition to the traditional storage functionality of PowerStore X model appliances, which supports serving external block and vVol storage to servers with FC and iSCSI.
This Oracle RAC database solution uses the PowerStore T model with a base enclosure that has 21 NVMe SSD drives and two extreme high-performance NVMe NVRAM drives that are designed for the PowerStore caching system.
For the Oracle database storage volumes and related VM operating system storage volumes, we applied the following design principles to create volumes:
- Three volumes for OCR for the Oracle RAC databases clusterware
- Four volumes for DATA
- Four volumes for REDO
- One volume each for FRA and TEMP
We used the storage volumes design shown in the following figure for the PROD RAC database on two nodes (on the left in the figure) and the DEV RAC database on two nodes (on the right in the figure):
Figure 6. Storage design of the PROD and DEV databases