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6 Sizing and Best Practices for Online Transaction Processing Applications with Oracle 11g R2 using Dell PS Series | BP1003
1 Introduction
Different types of database applications have varying performance and capacity needs. Understanding the
models for common database application workloads can be useful in predicting the possible application
behavior in a given infrastructure environment. The most common database application workload models are
OLTP and data warehousing (DW). This paper focuses on OLTP database workloads.
OLTP applications often need to deliver extremely fast response times and rapid access to data that is in high
demand. Moreover, significant data growth over time in a typical OLTP system leads to high capacity
requirements as well. While the OLTP data set size can grow exponentially over time, the active, frequently-
accessed data set size remains relatively small in comparison with the overall OLTP system size.
Storage infrastructure supporting OLTP platforms like Oracle RAC needs to non-disruptively scale both in
performance and capacity, and also deliver the required high performance in an optimal, cost-effective way.
PS Series hybrid arrays – combining solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs) within a single
chassis with automated data tiering – are well-suited for these OLTP environments.
1.1 Objective
The key objectives of testing were:
 Establish baseline I/O performance characteristics of the PS Series platform when running OLTP-like
I/O patterns using the ORION tool without deploying Oracle databases.
 Performance characterization using Benchmark Factory
®
for Databases, simulating Oracle OLTP
transactions on the 2-node Oracle RAC database with a TPC-E type workload.
 I/O profiling with Vdbench to demonstrate performance improvements with the automated data tiering
of PS6110XS hybrid arrays due to locality of data access in Oracle OLTP environments.
 Determine guidelines and best practices for deploying and achieving optimal performance of Oracle
11g R2 OLTP databases on PS Series arrays.
1.2 Audience
This paper is intended for system administrators, database administrators, and storage architects interested
in deploying Oracle OLTP database solutions on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) using PS Series SANs. It
is assumed that the readers of this document have familiarity with RHEL system administration, PS Series
storage array configuration, and Oracle 11g R2 database installation and administration tasks.