Performance analysis of the HP Serviceguard Storage Management Suite for Oracle Database

Executive summary
For HP-UX 11i, the HP Serviceguard Storage Management Suite is ideally suited to customers who
need the highest levels of availability and superior Oracle® Real Application Clusters (RAC) database
performance or who have an application that would benefit from a clustered file system for improved
manageability.
In this paper we evaluated the Clustered File System (CFS) with Oracle Disk Manager (ODM) enabled
in an Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) environment against the Shared Logical Volume Manager
(SLVM) asynchronous I/O disk access. In particular we looked at RAC scaling (from one to 3 cluster
members) in combination with application load scaling (light, medium, high workload).
Key results: with CFS/ODM compared to Raw SLVM:
• The transaction per minute (TPM) rate, on average, is decreased by 8% (5 to 15% range).
• Scaling factor from one to two nodes and from one to three nodes (respectively 1.5 and 1.8) is
identical whether we use TPMs or I/O rate as a comparison source.
• Oracle database sequential read wait time is increased by 15%. Oracle database sequential read
time is the time a user process is waiting for a physical I/O call to return when reading buffers into
the Oracle System Global Area (SGA).
• CPU consumption is increased by 5%.
• CFS network traffic is equivalent to 15% of the Oracle RAC Interconnect traffic.
The testing was done with HP-UX 11i v2, Oracle RAC 9.2.0.6 on HP 9000 rp3440-4 systems.
Results should be similar on HP Integrity as well as HP 9000 platforms with Oracle 10g R2 RAC since
ODM code is largely unchanged.
Targeted audience: This paper is intended to help pre-sales and field personnel to make an informed
decision on recommending the Clustered File System versus Shared LVM Raw disk access from an
OLTP performance standpoint. This document may be shared appropriately with customers. Some
knowledge of OLTP applications, Oracle RAC and HP-UX performance tools is advisable.
Introduction
Database administrators have always debated the pros and cons of using a file system or raw devices
for implementing databases. Improved manageability was obtained at a significant performance cost.
The HP Serviceguard Storage Management Suite for Oracle improves performance compared to a
traditional VxFs file system. Following is a list of the important features included in the HP
Serviceguard Storage Management Suite for Oracle:
• Cluster File System (CFS) provides excellent I/O performance and simplifies the installation and
ongoing management especially for RAC database. Oracle RAC is compatible with the cluster file
system. The CFS option is new with SGeRAC 11.17 release.
• Advanced volume management and file system capabilities offer dynamic multipathing, database
tablespace growth and hot relocation of failed redundant storage. It also provides a variety of
online options, including storage reconfiguration, volume and file system resizing.
• Oracle Disk Manager (ODM) delivers near raw performance.
• Quality of storage service (QoSS) enables administrators to set policies that segment company data
storage based on various characteristics and assign the data to appropriate classes of storage over
time.
• FlashSnap helps database administrators easily establish a database clone, a duplicate database
on a secondary host for off-host processing.
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