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Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Virtualized Storage (USP-V) for Oracle Databases-2. Performance

Based on white papers re:Hitachi USP-V best practices from Oracle, I expect to see some response time increases but the performance increases due to cache and the way the USP-V stripes the data across the storage should make the response time issue nearly undetectable. I ran 14 performance tests on multiple tiers of storage - SATA, Fibre Channel (in Raid 5 and 10 configurations) and SSD, each tier was tested using Orion (simple, matrix and dss modes) and Swingbench running on 11Gr2. From the database perspective, the most important item in the results is the Max Transactions per Minute (Max TPM) reported from Swingbench running on an actual 11.2.0.2 Oracle database using ASM. Why ASM? Raw storage means no file system caching, so the results I get are truely from the storage.

I started the first test and right away I noticed the storage wasn’t my bottleneck so I increased the virtual CPU’s in my LPAR to 8 and after test 2, I lowered the db_cache to a tiny 256MB. At this point, when I ran test 3, nearly all the IO was physical IO.




Test Number



Storage




Spindle Type



Raid Level




Virtualized



Cache(GB)



IOPS




MBPS



Max TPM




Max TPS



Avg TPS



Avg Resp




Disk Busy %



CPU%



1



Clariion FC




FC



5



No




4



1403




117.46



69413



1294




1083



65




30



95




2



Clariion FC



FC




5



No




4



1403



117.46




102911



2182




1450



51



24




87



3




Clariion FC



FC




5



No



4




1403



117.46




73011



1368



1087




66



100




84











The results of test 3 will be my baseline for future tests.

To see the virtualization overhead and how effective the USP-V cache is, I ran Swingbench on a database with Clariion storage in a USP-V cache “pass-through” configuration:



Test Number



Storage




Spindle Type



Raid Level




Virtualized



Cache(GB)



IOPS




MBPS



Max TPM




Max TPS



Avg TPS



Avg Resp




Disk Busy %



CPU%



4



Clariion




FC



5



Yes




pass-thru



N/A




N/A



62895



1190




984



78




42



71.4






The next test results show the Clariion behind the USP-V’s massive 512GB cache, all other things equal to the test above. The Clariion has 4GB of cache itself-this is Hitachi cache feeding the Clariion cache, feeding 10K FC spindles.



Test Number



Storage




Spindle Type



Raid Level




Virtualized



Cache(GB)



IOPS




MBPS



Max TPM




Max TPS



Avg TPS



Avg Resp




Disk Busy %



CPU%



5



Clariion




FC



5



Yes




512



1207




120.28



72666



1319




1087



65




94



85






As you can see above, the Max TPM increased and the avg response time improved. The next test is similar to the previous, but this time using a Hitachi AMS unit loaded with 7.5k sata disks. This was more of a functional test of the AMS unit...obviously you can't compare its performance to the EMC Clariion since the Clariion test above had 10k FC spindles. Ignoring that, I wanted to see a "worst-case" scenario of using sata disks for the databases.



Test Number



Storage




Spindle Type



Raid Level




Virtualized



Cache(GB)



IOPS




MBPS



Max TPM




Max TPS



Avg TPS



Avg Resp




Disk Busy %



CPU%



6



AMS




SATA



5



Yes




32



428




53.96



31853



963




476



149




100



85






The next set of tests were done on storage internal to the USP-V, virtualized and thin-provisioned with a 4GB clipper (cache partition) for the first 3 and the full 512GB clipper for the last 2:




Test Number



Storage




Spindle Type



Raid Level




Virtualized



Cache(GB)



IOPS




MBPS



Max TPM




Max TPS



Avg TPS



Avg Resp




Disk Busy %



CPU%



7



Internal




FC



5



Yes




4



1396




133.12



64168



1155




954



75




35



69.1



8



Internal




FC



10



Yes




4



2077




179.77



66451



1185




979



73




45



70.6



9



Internal




SSD



10



Yes




4



5122




214.70



64044



1171




966



75




43



69.9



10



Internal




FC



10



Yes




512



9486




308.92



66277



1166




956



74




45



71.3



11



Internal




SSD



5



Yes




512



8060




252.61



58844



110




935



81




43



72.8








In this series:


HDS USP-V Overview for Oracle DB

HDS USP-V Performance for Oracle DB
HDS USP-V Features for Oracle DB
HDS USP-V Thin Provisioning for Oracle DB

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