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WHITE PAPER

Key Findings

• QLogic

recommends using the QLogic FabricCache™ 10000 Series Adapter in an Oracle

Real Application Cluster (RAC) database

with Oracle’s Automatic Storage Management (ASM) feature enabled and provisioning LUNs as a multiple of the quantity of nodes

in the RAC cluster. This configuration ensures distribution of the cache load over the QLogic 10000 Series Adapters in the cluster.

• Oracle recommends four LUNs for a disk group and, for best cache optimization, making the LUN quantity a multiple of the nodes.

• Each 10000 Series Adapter may cache up to 256 LUNs.

• All 10000 Series Adapters in the cluster must be zoned to be visible to each other.

• QLogic FabricCache 10000 Series Adapters enable:

– OLTP processing to be almost twice the transactions at 56 percent of the response time.

– OLAP processing to be 3.25 times the transactions at 25 percent of the response time.

Realize Significant Performance Gains

in Oracle RAC with QLogic FabricCache

Guide to Best Practices

Summary of content (7 pages)

PAGE 1
White Paper Realize Significant Performance Gains in Oracle RAC with QLogic FabricCache Guide to Best Practices Key Findings •• QLogic® recommends using the QLogic FabricCache™ 10000 Series Adapter in an Oracle® Real Application Cluster (RAC) database with Oracle’s Automatic Storage Management (ASM) feature enabled and provisioning LUNs as a multiple of the quantity of nodes in the RAC cluster. This configuration ensures distribution of the cache load over the QLogic 10000 Series Adapters in the cluster.
PAGE 2
White Paper Executive Summary QLogic FabricCache 10000 Series Adapters bring shared, server-based caching to the SAN. The 10000 Series Adapters are purposely designed to address the high I/O demands and distributed nature of clustered applications and virtualized environments, including Oracle RAC. Using the following best practice guidelines, 10000 Series Adapters have been shown to improve Online Analytical Processing workloads in Oracle RAC environments by up to 3.
PAGE 3
White Paper caching Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters. In an Oracle RAC environment, Host Bus Adapters can be replaced using a process that is non-destructive to application operation. The replacement process includes the following general steps that must be performed on each server (node) in the Oracle RAC cluster: QLogic FabricCache 10000 Series Adapter Best Practices 1. Shut down the node.
PAGE 4
White Paper Data and Index I/O Behavior with FabricCache The tablespaces that support the data and indexes are the largest tablespaces (use the most storage) and provide the largest gain with the 10000 Series Adapter read caching. Distributing the LUN cache ownership across all of the nodes in the RAC cluster increases the available FabricCache for caching.
PAGE 5
White Paper •• The benefit of this shared cache becomes apparent when full table scans occur (Oracle does not cache this in the block buffer). Any repeated full table scans on any of the nodes may benefit from the information cached in the 10000 Series Adapter in the cluster. NOTE: Because the I/O behavior is in-band, it is not visible to the database or even the driver.
PAGE 6
White Paper Summary and Conclusions QLogic recommends using the QLogic 10000 Series Fibre Channel Adapter in an Oracle RAC database with Oracle’s ASM feature and providing LUNs in a multiple of the nodes in the RAC cluster. Oracle recommends four LUNs for a disk group and, for best cache optimization, making the LUN quantity a multiple of the node quantity.
PAGE 7
White Paper Appendix A: Configuring a QLogic FibreCache 10000 Series Adapter Cluster 7. Set the cache pool for each 10000 Series Adapter as follows: Follow these steps to create a cluster and enable a cache on the 10000 Series Adapter. 1. Insert the 10000 Series Adapter and PCIe® flash daughter card into the server. 2. Connect the 10000 Series Adapter to the fabric switch. 3. On the fabric switch, zone all of the 10000 Series Adapters (at least one in each server) onto the same zone.