Home > Workload Solutions > Oracle > Guides > Reference Architecture Guide—Dell EMC Ready Solutions for Oracle: Design for Unity All Flash Storage > Test objectives
In a typical IT environment, databases might be required for testing, development, reporting, or online analytics. Usually, these additional databases must be based on copies of the production databases because the new features or hardware cannot be tested directly on the production systems themselves.
The Dell EMC Unity 650F storage array’s snapshot feature enables you to create multiple copies of any database. The objective of the tests described in this chapter is to simulate a typical customer environment in which we create a baseline Oracle production database, measure its performance, and then create multiple snapshot copies of it to measure the impact of creating snapshots. Another objective is to study the data savings feature of the Unity storage as applied to the Oracle databases and analyze how it can help customers with data compression and space savings. These savings will ultimately translate into storage-cost and TCO savings.
In our use cases, we analyze the impact of upgrading Oracle Database 12c to the 18c version on the related performance and data savings numbers. This data benefits the DBAs and test/dev engineers who frequently must spend hours managing database creation and refreshing the environments, often while limited by capacity, performance, and number of database copies.
The following use cases demonstrate the performance and capacity savings of Oracle Database 12cR2 running on the Unity 650F storage array, as well as the performance impact of creating Unity snapshots of Oracle Database 12c:
Our use-case testing included stress and compression testing to produce the performance numbers that are shown in this reference architecture guide. The data was extracted from Oracle Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) reports. Compression and performance results documented in this guide are provided as a reference. The actual numbers you achieve might vary with your environment.
Note: During all testing, the Unity inline data reduction feature was enabled, as noted in Unity 650F storage design. This feature uses some storage CPU and memory cycles.