Demartek Evaluation - Improving Oracle Database Response Times with All-Flash HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450c

June 2015

Enterprise applications have extremely demanding performance requirements and the Oracle database is a prime example of a high performance application used to run critical business workloads. Careers are built on managing and tuning Oracle databases. However, no matter how well tuned a database is, its performance will still be limited by the capabilities of the hardware it runs on. Storage systems have traditionally been the slowest part of a compute infrastructure in terms of IOPs, bandwidth, and particularly response times. Businesses are increasingly turning to flash storage to improve these performance metrics.

Flash storage I/O bandwidth numbers of multiple gigabytes of data per second and hundreds of thousands to millions of I/O operations per second across corporate SANs are both achievable and common. Response time, or latency, is becoming an increasingly critical component of enterprise-class performance in all-flash arrays. In highly transactional workloads low latency can be the primary driver of the application experience. Sub-millisecond I/O latency is expected from enterprise all-flash arrays and is a critical component in optimizing the performance of Oracle workloads. Robust flash-based storage, such as the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450c delivers this type of performance out of the box.

Demartek has evaluated the All-flash HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450c storage system supporting an Oracle database application and analyzed the I/O response time improvements offered by both 16Gb FC technology and 8Gb Express Writes to an Oracle workload. For this project, Demartek ran a transactional workload application on an Oracle 12c database in an Oracle Enterprise Linux environment and analyzed the performance difference between end-to-end 8Gb FC and 16Gb FC SANs. Recognizing the some enterprises may be forced to remain at 8Gb FC for various business reasons, we also considered the performance effect of the HP 3PAR 8Gb Express Writes technology on the same workload.

Evaluation Series: HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 All-flash Array

Over the course of a few months, Demartek performed several Evaluations of the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450c All-flash Array. These evaluations included 8 and 16 Gb Fibre Channel technologies, database workloads and more. Click on the link to view the list of all of these evaluations.

View the Demartek Evaluation - Improving Oracle Database Response Times with All-Flash HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450c
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Demartek Evaluation Improving Oracle Response Times