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4 Test methodology
A series of I/O simulations were conducted using ORION to understand the performance characteristics of the
PS Series XV, S, and XS hybrid storage arrays.
The ORION tool was installed on the operating system (Red Hat
®
Enterprise Linux
®
in this case) and used to
simulate I/O on the external PS Series storage arrays. The PS Series storage volumes were presented to the
OS as block I/O devices. I/O simulations were conducted with small-sized 8K I/O block requests simulating
Oracle OLTP database I/O to understand the IOPS offered by the storage arrays. The Vdbench I/O tool was
used to evaluate the performance characteristics of the array when a specific locality of data on the disks was
frequently accessed as observed in a typical database environment.
Typical OLTP I/O is represented by a ratio of 70% read and 30% write I/O transactions. However, modern
OLTP I/O is typically represented as 90% read and 10% write, specifically for workloads simulating financial
organizations like banks and brokerage firms. Find more detailed information about TPC-E characteristics in
the document, TPC-E vs. TPC-C: Characterizing the New TPC-E Benchmark via an I/O Comparison Study.
The I/O simulation using the ORION tool was performed to characterize both TPC-C and TPC-E I/O ratios
defined previously, but the actual database performance characterization was performed by executing TPC-
C-like database transactions on the PS Series XV array and TPC-E style database transactions on PS Series
hybrid arrays using Quest Benchmark Factory.
4.1 Measurement and monitoring
Detailed performance metrics were captured from storage, operating system, and database application layers
as listed in the following.
ORION: Total IOPS and average latency as part of ORION standard test results were captured.
Quest Benchmark Factory: The following metrics were captured from Quest Benchmark Factory
while executing TPC-E database transactions:
- TPS: Transactions per second, based on the simulated load.
- Response time: End-to-end SQL execution time, measured from SQL submission until the end
of the fetch of the SQL result set.
- Transaction time: Average time to run a single transaction.
SAN HeadQuarters (SAN HQ): PS Series storage array statistics for various objects including
network, disk, I/O performance, and I/O capacity were captured. A dedicated server was used to run
this tool.
Oracle AWR reports: Oracle Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) reports were collected at one-
minute intervals while executing TPC-E transactions. The top five events by total wait time were
analyzed to determine if there were any bottlenecks related to RAC, network, or other factors.
Oracle OSWatcher Black Box (OSWbb): Oracle OSWatcher Black Box utility captures and archives
operating system and network statistics. This utility was used to capture detailed operating system
statistics such as vmstat, iostat, netstat, and others at regular intervals while executing the tests.