Oracle/HP Best Practices Guide for HP IO Accelerators

Overview 5
Overview
Introduction
This document explains best practices for integrating HP IO Accelerator technology in Oracle
environments. The three main sections are:
• Redundancy architectures (how to keep your data safe and available)
• Performance tuning for the demands of your Oracle database
• Performance architectures (how to use the IO Accelerator to speed up Oracle to meet your reliability,
performance, and consolidation needs)
Significant performance improvements can be attained by using IO Accelerators, instead of conventional
storage, even if no major I/O bottlenecks occur in the existing storage. These improvements in throughput
are typically the result of the IO Accelerator low latency. Many Oracle databases target 5-15 milliseconds
as an acceptable I/O latency time, but the IO Accelerator can deliver sub 1millisecond access times,
even for multi-I/O transaction groups.
The redundancy section offers many options for providing data protection. Because every deployment
needs a different level of data reliability guarantees, reading through the options in this section is highly
recommended.
The performance characterization section helps you identify which areas in your Oracle database are
currently bottlenecks, and it makes recommendations on how to use IO Accelerators to alleviate those
bottlenecks.
The performance architectures section contains the details of various IO Accelerator deployment options
that can be used to alleviate the bottlenecks found through performance characterization. It also explains
how to migrate data off existing storage and on to IO Accelerator-backed storage.
Single-instance and RAC overview
Single-instance Oracle runs on a single server is the most common type of Oracle deployment. For
information on using IO Accelerators to enhance system performance on single-instance Oracle systems,
see "Single-instance performance architectures (on page 16)."
Oracle RAC enables a cluster of servers to operate on the same database. This provides a highly fault-
tolerant environment, where the loss of any individual server, or even multiple servers, does not impact the
availability of the database to the application.
For more information on Oracle RAC, see the Oracle website
(http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/clustering/pdf/twp_rac10gr2.pdf ).
Using IO Accelerators with Oracle
Several options are available for using IO Accelerators to host Oracle storage needs. The IO Accelerators
can be formatted with a standard filesystem, added to ASM volumes, or set as flash cache targets.