Improving the performance of single instance Oracle on file systems, January 2008

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Audience
This paper is for customers, presales personnel, and field personnel wanting to understand the
possible performance benefits of ODM included in SG SMS for Oracle bundles.
The reader must have some knowledge of the following:
• Oracle databases
• Volume managers (LVM and VxVM)
• Performance benchmarking
Terminology
Term Definition
Balanced
Configuration
An end-to-end system tuned so there are no bottlenecks to limit performance. For example, the
back-end storage configuration is configured so it will not limit performance, and the
configuration is such that Oracle can take full advantage of available CPU resources.
CFS (Cluster File
System)
A file system that is available for concurrent read and write access to one or more members of a
cluster.
Driver
A separate, physical server that runs the online transaction processing (OLTP) application. It
generates order-entry requests such as new order, status, and delivery requests to the remote
Oracle database server instance, using SQL queries.
I/O subsystem One of the five tested configurations:
• Online JFS on VxVM with ODM enabled
• Online JFS on VxVM
• Online JFS on LVM
• Raw VxVM volumes
• Raw LVM volumes
LVM (Logical Volume
Manager)
A subsystem used to manage disk storage and providing a level of abstraction from the traditional
view of disks and physical partitions. It helps provide a system administrator more flexibility in
allocating storage for applications and users.
ODM (Oracle Disk
Manager)
An API defined by Oracle that can be implemented by any file system vendor. It is the library
implementation for Veritas File System (VxFS) that is provided in HP SG SMS bundles for Oracle.
OLTP (Online
Transaction
Processing)
A system that takes requests in real-time from one or more clients.
In an order-entry processing environment, requests might be to view the status of an order or to
insert a new order into the database.
Typically, the OLTP workload is a fairly balanced mix of read and write requests.
In this benchmark, an OLTP application was used to simulate an order-entry environment,
allowing an increasing workload to be tested in a controlled way.
Online JFS (also
known as Veritas File
System and VxFS)
The file system used in this paper’s benchmarks.
Online JFS is the marketing name for VxFS.
SUT (System Under
Test)
The physically distinct server where the Oracle database server is running. When running the
benchmarks, this server was dedicated to this task.
TPM (Transactions Per
Minute)
The measure of efficiency of the system in converting CPU cycles into work.
As the workload increases, and if the system is not limited, the transaction rate increases.
VxFS (Veritas File
System)
In these experiments, VxFS v4.1 is used.
(Online JFS is the marketing name for VxFS.)
VxVM (Veritas Volume
Manager)
In these benchmarks, VxVM v4.1 is used.