HP StorageWorks P4000 Scalability for

Performance with Oracle

Technical Brief Describing how Oracle environments benefit
from expanding P4000 SAN Solutions
Technical brief

Table of contents
Executive summary............................................................................................................................... 2
Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 2
P4000 SAN Overview ..................................................................................................................... 2
Overview of Oracle ......................................................................................................................... 2
P4000/Oracle test environment ............................................................................................................ 3
P4000 SAN .................................................................................................................................... 3
Servers ........................................................................................................................................... 3
ASM Layout..................................................................................................................................... 3
Test hardware and software .............................................................................................................. 3
Test environment .............................................................................................................................. 4
Performance and scale out .................................................................................................................... 5
Storage node addition ...................................................................................................................... 5
Scale-out performance ...................................................................................................................... 6
Other performance considerations ..................................................................................................... 7
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 8

Executive summary
In todays competitive environment, companies need to accelerate business growth, while keeping
costs under control. Having the ability to easily scale your storage will keep database and storage
administrators from over-allocating storage capacity to resolve anticipated issues associated with
application performance and space.
This paper explores how to help optimize a HP Storage Works P4000 SAN for performance in an
Oracle 11gR2 online transaction processing (OLTP) environment. The P4000 SAN demonstrates the
value of a modular, scale out storage architecture. The P4000 SAN provides storage that is highly
scalable and optimized for Oracle databases. A virtual pool of storage is created, which is easy to
manage and scales out capacity and performance without causing downtime.
This HP and Oracle solution demonstrates SAN through storage virtualization. Furthermore,
significantly higher returns on investment (ROI) are achieved through pooled storage capacity and the
ability to scale out storage without disruption. This will allow IT to right size space and energy
requirements while helping to optimize operational costs. The P4000 SAN and Oracle 11gR2 join to
make a complete, scalable solution.

Introduction
P4000 SAN Overview
HP P4000 SANs use the SAN/IQ storage management software to pool together the storage
capacity and performance of the P4000 storage nodes. Each storage node consists of a disk array,
processor, memory, two network ports, and redundant power supplies. The individual storage nodes
are fully functional disk arrays with hardware RAID 5, 6, or 10.
The SAN/IQ storage software manages clusters of nodes as a single storage pool. The Network RAID
functionality stripes and protects multiple copies of data across a cluster of storage nodes helping to
eliminate any single point of failure in the HP P4000 SAN. Applications have near continuous data
availability in the event of a disk, controller, storage node, power, network, or site failure. Network
RAID levels are chosen on a per-volume basis and can be changed on the fly. Network RAID levels 0,
5, 6, 10, 10+1, 10+2 are available.
The modular design and the flexibility of P4000 SANs allow storage and performance to be increased
without disruption. As storage nodes are added to a P4000 cluster, volumes are rebalanced to span all
storage nodes increasing storage capacity and performance. Scaling a P4000 SAN for increased
capacity also yields better performance.

Overview of Oracle
Oracles Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) serves data for a wide range of
applications in the IT world. Data access patterns vary widely in Oracle environments both small
block transaction intensive processing and large block data mining applications. The amount of data
required to do business doesnt shrink. As organizations and customer bases expand so does the
amount of data Oracle is asked to manage. The scalable performance and online expansion of the
P4000 SAN makes it an ideal storage solution for Oracle environments.

P4000/Oracle test environment

A test environment was built to characterize the behavior of a P4000 SAN serving storage to an
Oracle RAC environment while scaling the SAN for performance under an OLTP type workload.
Quest Benchmark Factory was used to generate an OLTP type of load on a two node RAC cluster.

P4000 SAN
The volumes on the P4000 storage cluster were created with Network RAID10 (2-way mirror),
meaning each data block for a particular volume is striped and mirrored across different storage
nodes in the same SAN. The individual disks in the P4000 storage nodes were configured in a
RAID10 set to provide disk-level data protection. Finally, each storage node was connected through
two different gigabit Ethernet switches for network load balancing and redundancy.

Servers
Two servers were combined into an Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC). The servers were installed
with Oracle Enterprise Linux 5u5 and Oracle version 11g Release 2. Each server had a two port
QLA4062c HBA used as hardware iSCSI initiator with Linux native multipathing.

ASM Layout
Oracles Automatic Storage Management (ASM) was used to manage the P4000 volumes. Four ASM
disk groups were created. The ASM disk group DATA consisted of four P4000 volumes that contained
all the data files in the database.

Test hardware and software

Oracle RAC Cluster Nodes

HP Proliant DL 785 G5

Oracle Enterprise Linux 5u5

Qlogic iSCSI HBA QLA4062C

Oracle 11g Release 2

Oracle ASM

Storage

HP StorageWorks P4500 15k SAS

HP P4000 SAN/IQ 8.5

RAID 10

HP P4000 Centralized
Management Console

Network RAID 10
Network

Procurve 1800-24G switch

Procurve 3400cl-24G switch

Test environment
Figure 1: Test environment

Performance and scale out

Oracle performance was first measured against a P4000 SAN with two nodes in the storage cluster.
Then two additional storage nodes were added, the cluster rebalanced with the new nodes and
performance was measured again.
10ms was chosen as the standard for good performance for the tests described in this paper. With
I/O latency at less than or equal to 10ms it is unlikely that storage performance is impeding any part of
the Oracle environment. The number of Oracle sessions working in the database was increased,
causing the number of OLTP transactions per second (TPS) to also increase, when I/O latency increased
to 10ms that number of Oracle sessions chosen as the acceptable number of users for the environment.

Storage node addition

Two nodes were added to the existing two node cluster resulting in a four node cluster. SAN I/Q
automatically restripes the volumes to span all nodes in the cluster. SAN I/Q allows the storage
administrator to choose how much bandwidth is dedicated to restriping. The restriping operation is
done online without causing downtime.

Figure 2: Online scale-out

Scale-out performance
Figures 4 and 5 show the relative performance improvement of the expanded P4000 SAN cluster. All
performance metrics doubled with the addition of 2 more storage nodes. The scaling operation was
initiated with a few clicks in the SAN I/Q GUI and required no downtime. In other testing this linear
performance improvement has been seen to continue as nodes are added. IOPs and throughput scale
up linearly until other limitations in the SAN are met. If network bandwidth and server capacity are
not limitations the P4000 SAN can meet virtually any performance or capacity requirement.

Figure 3: 2X Performance Scaling

Figure 4: 2 Node SAN

Two nodes: 4051 IOPS with less than10ms average latency

Figure 5: 4 Node SAN

Four nodes: 8533 IOPs with less than 10ms average latency

Other performance considerations

Oracle installations vary greatly in their I/O patterns and server requirements. There are several
general rules that can benefit performance and should be considered when designing an Oracle
environment on a P4000 SAN
OLTP and Data Warehouse databases benefit from separation. Heavy random access loads can
perturb cache and impact the throughput of sequential access jobs that are running at the same
time. Consider scheduling the loads to run at different times or move the database to separate
clusters if this becomes an issue.
Redo logs are Common bottlenecks in I/O intensive Oracle applications. Redo logs and archive
logs should reside on different volumes to avoid contention during a log switch. Transactions will be
held up if log switches are slow.
Small volumes deliver higher IOPs than a few large volumes under an OLTP type of load.
Multiple HBAs/initiators and/or multiple network connections are important for reducing the chance
of connectivity loss to the SAN.

Conclusion
In business-critical Oracle environments IT organizations are faced with meeting challenging service
levels. The amount of data storage is constantly growing and downtime equates with lost revenue. The
HP StorageWorks P4000 SAN is a highly available storage solution that linearly scales both
performance and capacity. The P4000 solves performance problems by allowing the storage
administrator to add nodes without disruption, scaling-up both speed and space with each new node.
Even in the face of rapidly expanding databases, the P4000 promises SAN performance and data
availability that grow as needed. The modular design provides the flexibility and ease of expansion
so that storage requirements can be met.

To learn more about how HP StorageWorks P4000 SAN enhances performance and scalability in
Oracle environment, visit: HP StorageWorks P4000 SAN Users Guide or www.hp.com/go/p4000

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4AA1-9550ENW, Created October 2010