White Papers

26 Sizing and Best Practices for Online Transaction Processing Applications with Oracle 11g R2 using Dell PS Series | BP1003
The results displayed in Figure 11 confirm higher performance when there are eight or more volumes.
Increasing the number of volumes beyond eight did not result in any significant increase in IOPS.
IOPS per volume configuration
Note: A configuration with more small volumes is preferred over a low number of large volumes for better
performance and simpler management of OLTP databases. As illustrated in Figure 11, there was 23%
improvement in performance when the number of volumes were increased from 2 to 8.
5.3.6 Oracle ASM and non-ASM environments
Oracle recommends using ASM for managing OS disk volumes due to the advanced management
capabilities. PS Series arrays provide load balancing among all available disk drives across the volumes
within a storage pool. These two features complement each other to provide the most flexible and optimal
performance configuration.
The primary objective of these tests was to determine the baseline I/O performance of the PS6110XS array in
an ASM and non-ASM environment.
The ORION default option, CONCAT mode, was used to simulate non-ASM test scenarios. To evaluate the
ASM configuration, disk volumes were simulated in RAID 0 mode by ORION, treating them as individual
volumes and striping the I/O requests across them. Test results from both non-ASM and ASM configurations
were compared.
IOPS per volume configuration
IOPS
Number of volumes
23%
6%
2
4
6