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5 Sizing and Best Practices for Online Transaction Processing Applications with Oracle 11g R2 using Dell PS Series | BP1003
Executive summary
Online transaction processing (OLTP) applications — ranging from web-based e-commerce sites, to
accounting systems, to customer support programs — are at the heart of today’s business functions. They are
the foundation for a wide range of mission-critical applications, particularly those utilizing Oracle
®
real
application cluster (RAC) database platforms, and depend on exceptional storage performance and reliability.
Moreover, data generated by OLTP applications can grow exponentially over time. Thus, designing and
managing storage that can effectively accommodate performance, capacity, and future growth requirements
for Oracle OLTP databases is a key challenge today.
This paper presents sizing guidelines and best practices for deploying Oracle 11g R2 OLTP databases with
Dell™ PS Series arrays based on a series of storage I/O performance test results. A variety of OLTP
benchmarking tools including Oracle I/O Numbers (ORION), Vdbench, TPC-C, and TPC-E were run to
demonstrate the efficacy of the PS Series arrays for the OLTP workloads. Detailed tests results for Dell
PS6110XS hybrid arrays are included in this paper along with some key performance results for PS6010XV
and PS6010S arrays.
Key findings include:
 PS6110XS hybrid arrays can deliver high IOPS with low latency for OLTP workloads. For example:
25,745 IOPS with less than 1 ms latency for a TPC-E like workload; and 17,000 IOPS with 5 ms
latency for a TPC-C like workload.
 Highly effective, dynamic, automated data tiering by PS Series firmware for OLTP environments. For
example: 51% IOPS increase over time due to tiering between SSDs and HDDs in Vdbench test.
 Oracle ASM and PS Series load balancing features complement each other to provide optimal
performance.
 A single PS6110XS array produced more than 8,700 IOPS even with very heavy write-intensive
operations simulated as part of TPC-E workload on a 2-node Oracle RAC database.
 The PS6010XV array in RAID 10 configuration was able to sustain approximately 5,000 IOPS and
PS6010S array produces almost 35,000 IOPS for 100% small random read I/O.
Additionally, this paper presents guidelines for designing Oracle OLTP environments including database
volume layout configurations, Oracle Automatic Memory Management (AMM), and Oracle Automatic Storage
Management (ASM) considerations for the PS Series platform are also discussed in this paper.