HP StorageWorks P4000 Scalability for Performance with Oracle

Technical Brief Describing how Oracle environments benefit from expanding P4000 SAN Solutions

Technical brief

Table of contents

Executive summary ............................................................................................................................... 2

Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 2P4000 SAN Overview ..................................................................................................................... 2Overview of Oracle ......................................................................................................................... 2

P4000/Oracle test environment ............................................................................................................ 3P4000 SAN .................................................................................................................................... 3Servers ........................................................................................................................................... 3ASM Layout ..................................................................................................................................... 3Test hardware and software .............................................................................................................. 3Test environment .............................................................................................................................. 4

Performance and scale out .................................................................................................................... 5Storage node addition ...................................................................................................................... 5Scale-out performance ...................................................................................................................... 6Other performance considerations ..................................................................................................... 7

Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 8

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Executive summary In todays competitive environment, companies need to accelerate business growth, while keeping costs under control. Having the ability to easily scale your storage will keep database and storage administrators from over-allocating storage capacity to resolve anticipated issues associated with application performance and space.

This paper explores how to help optimize a HP Storage Works P4000 SAN for performance in an Oracle 11gR2 online transaction processing (OLTP) environment. The P4000 SAN demonstrates the value of a modular, scale out storage architecture. The P4000 SAN provides storage that is highly scalable and optimized for Oracle databases. A virtual pool of storage is created, which is easy to manage and scales out capacity and performance without causing downtime.

This HP and Oracle solution demonstrates SAN through storage virtualization. Furthermore, significantly higher returns on investment (ROI) are achieved through pooled storage capacity and the ability to scale out storage without disruption. This will allow IT to right size space and energy requirements while helping to optimize operational costs. The P4000 SAN and Oracle 11gR2 join to make a complete, scalable solution.

Introduction

P4000 SAN Overview HP P4000 SANs use the SAN/IQ storage management software to pool together the storage capacity and performance of the P4000 storage nodes. Each storage node consists of a disk array, processor, memory, two network ports, and redundant power supplies. The individual storage nodes are fully functional disk arrays with hardware RAID 5, 6, or 10.

The SAN/IQ storage software manages clusters of nodes as a single storage pool. The Network RAID functionality stripes and protects multiple copies of data across a cluster of storage nodes helping to eliminate any single point of failure in the HP P4000 SAN. Applications have near continuous data availability in the event of a disk, controller, storage node, power, network, or site failure. Network RAID levels are chosen on a per-volume basis and can be changed on the fly. Network RAID levels 0, 5, 6, 10, 10+1, 10+2 are available.

The modular design and the flexibility of P4000 SANs allow storage and performance to be increased without disruption. As storage nodes are added to a P4000 cluster, volumes are rebalanced to span all storage nodes increasing storage capacity and performance. Scaling a P4000 SAN for increased capacity also yields better performance.

Overview of Oracle Oracles Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) serves data for a wide range of applications in the IT world. Data access patterns vary widely in Oracle environments both small block transaction intensive processing and large block data mining applications. The amount of data required to do business doesnt shrink. As organizations and customer bases expand so does the amount of data Oracle is asked to manage. The scalable performance and online expansion of the P4000 SAN makes it an ideal storage solution for Oracle environments.

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P4000/Oracle test environment A test environment was built to characterize the behavior of a P4000 SAN serving storage to an Oracle RAC environment while scaling the SAN for performance under an OLTP type workload. Quest Benchmark Factory was used to generate an OLTP type of load on a two node RAC cluster.

P4000 SAN The volumes on the P4000 storage cluster were created with Network RAID10 (2-way mirror), meaning each data block for a particular volume is striped and mirrored across different storage nodes in the same SAN. The individual disks in the P4000 storage nodes were configured in a RAID10 set to provide disk-level data protection. Finally, each storage node was connected through two different gigabit Ethernet switches for network load balancing and redundancy.

Servers Two servers were combined into an Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC). The servers were installed with Oracle Enterprise Linux 5u5 and Oracle version 11g Release 2. Each server had a two port QLA4062c HBA used as hardware iSCSI initiator with Linux native multipathing.

ASM Layout Oracles Automatic Storage Management (ASM) was used to manage the P4000 volumes. Four ASM disk groups were created. The ASM disk group DATA consisted of four P4000 volumes that contained all the data files in the database.

Test hardware and software

Oracle RAC Cluster Nodes HP Proliant DL 785 G5

Qlogic iSCSI HBA QLA4062C

Oracle Enterprise Linux 5u5

Oracle 11g Release 2

Oracle ASM

Storage HP StorageWorks P4500 15k SAS

RAID 10

Network RAID 10

HP P4000 SAN/IQ 8.5

HP P4000 Centralized Management Console

Network Procurve 1800-24G switch

Procurve 3400cl-24G switch

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Test environment

Figure 1: Test environment

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Performance and scale out Oracle performance was first measured against a P4000 SAN with two nodes in the storage cluster. Then two additional storage nodes were added, the cluster rebalanced with the new nodes and performance was measured again.

10ms was chosen as the standard for good performance for the tests described in this paper. With I/O latency at less than or equal to 10ms it is unlikely that storage performance is impeding any part of the Oracle environment. The number of Oracle sessions working in the database was increased, causing the number of OLTP transactions per second (TPS) to also increase, when I/O latency increased to 10ms that number of Oracle sessions chosen as the acceptable number of users for the environment.

Storage node addition Two nodes were added to the existing two node cluster resulting in a four node cluster. SAN I/Q automatically restripes the volumes to span all nodes in the cluster. SAN I/Q allows the storage administrator to choose how much bandwidth is dedicated to restriping. The restriping operation is done online without causing downtime.

Figure 2: Online scale-out

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Scale-out performance Figures 4 and 5 show the relative performance improvement of the expanded P4000 SAN cluster. All performance metrics doubled with the addition of 2 more storage nodes. The scaling operation was initiated with a few clicks in the SAN I/Q GUI and required no downtime. In other testing this linear performance improvement has been seen to continue as nodes are added. IOPs and throughput scale up linearly until other limitations in the SAN are met. If network bandwidth and server capacity are not limitations the P4000 SAN can meet virtually any performance or capacity requirement.

Figure 3: 2X Performance Scaling

Figure 4: 2 Node SAN Two nodes: 4051 IOPS with less than10ms average latency

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Figure 5: 4 Node SAN Four nodes: 8533 IOPs with less than 10ms average latency

Other performance considerations Oracle installations vary greatly in their I/O patterns and server requirements. There are several general rules that can benefit performance and should be considered when designing an Oracle environment on a P4000 SAN

OLTP and Data Warehouse databases benefit from separation. Heavy random access loads can perturb cache and impact the throughput of sequential access jobs that are running at the same time. Consider scheduling the loads to run at different times or move the database to separate clusters if this becomes an issue.

Redo logs are Common bottlenecks in I/O intensive Oracle applications. Redo logs and archive logs should reside on different volumes to avoid contention during a log switch. Transactions will be held up if log switches are slow.

Small volumes deliver higher IOPs than a few large volumes under an OLTP type of load. Multiple HBAs/initiators and/or multiple network connections are important for reducing the chance

of connectivity loss to the SAN.

Conclusion In business-critical Oracle environments IT organizations are faced with meeting challenging service levels. The amount of data storage is constantly growing and downtime equates with lost revenue. The HP StorageWorks P4000 SAN is a highly available storage solution that linearly scales both performance and capacity. The P4000 solves performance problems by allowing the storage administrator to add nodes without disruption, scaling-up both speed and space with each new node.

Even in the face of rapidly expanding databases, the P4000 promises SAN performance and data availability that grow as needed. The modular design provides the flexibility and ease of expansion so that storage requirements can be met.

To learn more about how HP StorageWorks P4000 SAN enhances performance and scalability in Oracle environment, visit: HP StorageWorks P4000 SAN Users Guide or www.hp.com/go/p4000

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Copyright 2010 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates.

4AA1-9550ENW, Created October 2010

Executive summaryIntroductionP4000 SAN OverviewOverview of Oracle

P4000/Oracle test environmentP4000 SANServersASM LayoutTest hardware and softwareTest environment

Performance and scale outStorage node additionScale-out performanceOther performance considerations

Conclusion

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