【EMC Proven Solutions Introduction】 Deploying Oracle Database on EMC VNX Unified Storage - Best practices for provisioning storage and leveraging storage efficiency features

This proven solution explained how the EMC VNX unified storage platform can be effectively used for deploying enterprise Oracle Database applications.  It also outlines the Oracle performance testing done by EMC performance engineering and provided some best paractics for deploying Oracle database applications.

Please refer to the white paper at Everything Oracle at EMC:

https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-14039

FAST VP and FAST Cache can be used alone or together to achieve the maximum possible benefits.  FAST VP tracks the sub-LUN temperature at a 1GB granularity, and in turn, these data slices are automatically migrated to the appropriate tiers within a pool depending on temperature, while FAST Cache uses a memory bitmap to track the hit rates of data at 64KB granularity, this limits the size of FAST Cache that a given storage system can support.  By combining both FAST VP and FAST Cache, users can scale their Flash tier to any size their application requires.

Some best practices for Oracle database deployment with FAST VP and FAST Cache:

Oracle Log Files with FAST Suite

The IO pattern on Oracle logs files, both online and archive, tend to be highly sequential in nature that rotating drives can handle very efficiently.  EMC’s general recommendation is not to use either FAST Cache or FAST VP for Oracle archive files and online redo log files.

Separate Pools for Data and Log Files

EMC does not recommend placing Oracle data files and log files in the same pool for the reasons of:

Reliability:  the transaction logs play a very pivotal role in Oracle Database recovery.  In the event of data file corruption, the database administrator can go back to an older copy of the data file and apply the logs.  Similarly if logs are lost, the Oracle Database can guarantee zero or minimal data loss if online redo logs are multiplexed to different sets of spindles. By putting data and logs into the same pool, the fundamental best practices of fault domains is ignored. Unless the user has some other data recovery plan like CDP, EMC does not recommend putting both data and logs in the same pool.

IO type and size:  the IO profile of log files tends to be highly sequential.  By mixing log files with data files, the sustained write bandwidth of a drive drops as the spindles begin to seek more often.

The Right Database Layout for a Highly Consolidated Environment

In the environment with multiple database applications, FAST VP can be used to create fewer multipurpose pools to guarantee SLAs rather than creating several small single-purpose storage containers, while still taking into consideration the criticality, fault domains, and IO characteristics of the data. For example, pool 1 with 15k SAS drives RAID 1/0 for all Redo Logs; pool 2 with 3 tiers of EFD, SAS, NL-SAS RAID 5 or 6 for all data files; pool 3 with NL-SAS only RAID 5 or 6 for all Archive Logs.