Troubleshooting

Improving Oracle OLTP database performance with Dell Fluid Cache for DAS

For more details on the configuration of the ASM disk groups, refer to Table 7. For the rest of the

paper, the ASM disks added to the ‘DATA_DG’ will be referred to as data ASM disks and the ASM disks

added to the ‘FRA_DG’ will be referred to as FRA ASM disks.

For more details on the hardware and software configuration of the baseline, refer to the appendices.

In the rest of the paper, this configuration will be referred to as the “baseline configuration” or

“baseline”.

Fluid Cache for DAS-based storage solution (Fluid Cache)

This section describes how the baseline configuration described in the Traditional HDD-based storage

solution (Baseline Configuration) section was enhanced and configured as the Fluid Cache for DAS-

based storage solution. In the rest of the paper, this solution will be referred to as “Fluid Cache based

solution.”

In this solution, on top of the hardware and software configuration of the baseline, Fluid Cache

software was installed and enabled in the R720 database server. This solution was tested with Fluid

Cache enabled in write-back mode. This mode requires a minimum of two Express Flash PCIe SSDs to

ensure data protection and high availability that is achieved by unique journaling and block replication

technology.

As shown in Figure 2, a single Fluid Cache for DAS cache pool of ~650GB was created using two of the

350GB SLC Express Flash PCIe SSDs in the R720 database server. Since small random read/write I/O

workload benefits the most with caching, only the data ASM disks were enabled for caching in write-

back mode. Caching was not enabled on the FRA ASM disks since the I/O pattern to this is small

sequential and caching is not expected to benefit.