ORACLE 10g RAC: SEQUENTIAL WORKLOAD PERFORMANCE USING iSCSI AND NFS OVER 10GbE AND 4Gb FIBRE CHANNEL

12/12/2007

A NETAPP COLLABORATIVE TECHNICAL REPORT

The NetApp FAS6030 storage system was designed to handle very demanding enterprise applications.
It utilizes the latest 64-bit CPU architecture and is compatible with the latest high-speed data transport technologies, including 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) and 4Gb Fibre Channel (FC).
By utilizing these cutting-edge technologies, the FAS6030 provides the fast I/O features required by modern enterprise data warehouse operations.
To substantiate this claim, NetApp utilized a three-node Oracle 10g RAC database running on IBM Blade Servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux® Advanced Server 4.
NetApp's tests were performed with the following Oracle configurations:

• Oracle 10g RAC using NFS over 10GbE
• Oracle 10g RAC with Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) using LUNs accessed over 10GbE with iSCSI
• Oracle 10g RAC with Oracle ASM using LUNs accessed over 4Gb FC

To fully demonstrate the impact of the high-speed data transport configurations, NetApp utilized a workload that was very sequential in nature.

Network Appliance storage systems are compatible with the latest data transport technologies.
The purpose of this downloadable paper below is not to endorse one over the other, but there can be no doubt that NetApp storage with 10GbE is the clear winner in terms of database throughput capabilities, whether it’s used with NFS or Oracle ASM.
In addition, further technological developments will result in even better database performance. Enhanced 10GbE drivers are expected to result in even higher throughput for iSCSI as tcp offload capabilities are increased. Another development not mentioned in this paper is the new Oracle dNFS, a feature of Oracle Database 11g, which moves the NFS stack from the operating system to the Oracle software itself, resulting in improved performance and easier configuration. dNFS is also compatible with 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
All of these new developments result in more and better options for breaking the speed barrier in the enterprise data center that existed with the older Gigabit Ethernet and 2Gb/sec Fibre Channel standards.