The amount of data businesses are storing today is substantial. Computers are getting faster, and so are traditional rotating disk drives. Still the speed at which we can retrieve data from old rotating disk technology can’t keep up with the ever increasing thirst for reading data by today’s applications. Therefore, we need to start looking at new disk technologies that deliver data at a faster rate of speed, like flash drives.
This white paper explores EMC’s CLARiion CX4 flash drive technologies and how it can be used to boost performance in Oracle deployments. EMC flash drives allow you to create “Tier 0” storage with drives that outperform the traditional rotating disk drives. Flash drives increases performance by minimizing the latency, making these devices extremely fast for read sensitive applications, like databases.
In this white paper, you will learn about what kinds of workloads are a good fit for flash drive technology. If your data access is random and the I/O requests bring back small amounts of data at a time then flash drive technology will be a good fit. If you don’t pick the right kind of workload for flash drives you might not see the benefit from these low latency drives.
You can use Oracle AWR and Statspack performance reports to help you identify workload profiles. Using these reports will help you to identify workloads that have a large number of physical reads. Workloads with large numbers of physical reads, benefits most when stored on a flash drive. You want to make sure you find work loads where physical disk I/O cannot be easily reduced by simply tuning the cache and/or increasing memory.
In this white paper, there are a number of different case studies. These case studies help demonstrate how flash drive technology can be deployed in different situations. Drastic performance improvements can be seen by using flash drive technology over the more traditional data storage. If your system is currently experiencing some latency issues, or you are just looking for ways to improve your database performance, then you should consider reading about EMC’s CLARiion CX4 flash drive technologies.
