White Papers

Sizing an SC Series array for Oracle
68 Dell EMC SC Series: Oracle Best Practices | CML1114
all paths may not be achievable and therefore the test may not verify that all paths are functioning and yield
the IO potential of the array.
Dell EMC recommends repeating this test and validating the process on the production server after go-live to
validate and establish a benchmark of initial performance metrics.
Once a design can deliver the expected throughput requirement, additional disks can be added to the storage
solution to meet capacity requirements. But the converse is not necessarily true. If a design meets the
expected capacity requirements, adding additional disks to the storage solution may not make the design
meet the required throughput requirements. This can be illustrated by considering the following. Since the
capacity of individual disk drives is growing faster than the I/O throughput rates provided by the disks, a
situation can occur where a small number of disks can store a large volume of data, but cannot provide the
same I/O throughput as a larger number of smaller disks.
After validating throughput of I/O paths between the SC Series array and the server, and meeting capacity
requirements, test the disk I/O capabilities for the designed workload of the SC Series array. This will validate
that the storage design provides the required IOPS and throughput with acceptable latencies. The test must
not exceed the designed capacity of the array, otherwise the test results will be misleading. If the test does
exceed the designed capacity, reduce the number of test threads, outstanding I/Os, or both. Testing random
I/O should be done with I/O sizes of 8KB and 16KB as a starting point and adjust from there. When testing
sequential I/O, I/O sizes should be 8KB, 16KB, 64KB, or larger.
Dell EMC recommends repeating this test and validating the process on the production server after go-live to
validate and establish a benchmark of initial performance metrics.
This testing methodology assumes the guidelines mentioned in previous sections have been followed and
modified according for business requirements.
The principle of stripe-far-and-wide needs to be used in tandem with data warehouses to increase the
throughput potential of the I/O paths. For information on stripe-far-and-wide and ASM Stripe and Mirror
Everything (S.A.M.E) methodology, see sections 5.2 and 6.1 respectfully.
5.7 Plan for growth
A plan should exist for future growth of a database. There are many ways to handle growth, and the key
consideration is to be able to grow the I/O system without compromising on the I/O bandwidth.