Anyone who has experience with Oracle on FusionIO?

Hi,

We got a slide on FusionIO and EMC SSD performance for Oracle datebase. We notice that PCIe bus based FUsionIO seems more higher transfer rate than HBA limited performance. But it still has some defects as:

     -Limited number of cards depend on #PCI slots available

     -Increase performance of specific high random write activity

     -Use Oracle DataGuard to address HA requirement only which brings more workload for host

Agree?

More details goes to http://www.nyoug.org/Presentations/2009/Dec/Fluge_Oracle_on_SSD.pdf

Luis

Not much experience on FusionIO for me. But I will get back after more research.

Fusion-IO is a storage device based on NAND Flash technology at storage media layer, which is as same as SSD / SAS does, the difference is that Fusion-IO is direct-attached with system IO bus and somehow it bypass system South Bridge chip and RAID controller, it is the reason Fusion-IO is called as IO Memory, therefore it is able to provide better IO latency and bandwidth.

EMC Lightning is mixture technology of “Server Cache”, “FAST Automation” and “Distributed Caching” (You could look at the article for reference, http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2011/05/understanding-project-lightning.html )

It tends to resolve two major customer expectation of implementation SSD solution.

Selection right part of your Data / Database, EMC FAST technology help you to select “HOT” data and promote them from SAS or NL_SAS to SSD for better performance, and at meaning time, provide best of method of data efficiency from Finance perspective.

Less IO latency, Lighting card server inside attached with PCI-E bus with Distributed Caching enabling would keep HOT data close CPU, that means less latency.

Eddy

You mentioned about “entire database runs on FusionIO”, well, it does help, but no efficiency, in a typical OLTP environment, active data would be no more than 10-15% of total, EMC FAST help your to automatically select active data to promote to SSD, that would decrease IO latency and improve Oracle performance.

The whitepaper , http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h8850-oracle-performance-vnx-fastcache-wp.pdf, address this well.  

Eddy

One thing that makes project Lightning stand out from plain PCIe Flash boards is the marriage of shared enterprise storage systems and local Flash memory.

Although Flash in storage systems (EMC EFD in VNX and VMAX) drives good performance, it cannot outperform an I/O done locally against an internal PCIe board. But the drawback is that the data on the local board is local to the server only and cannot be shared (i.e. RAC), protected (i.e. storage mirroring, snaps/clones) and probably is not very well protected against failures (RAID, scrubbing, checksumming etc).

This is where Lightning will bring the best of both worlds together. For now, using something like FusionIO is interesting from a pure performance standpoint but at the expense of reliability and integrity. And if you want to go down that path, maybe you should drop the ACID requirement alltogether and look at in-memory databases (Oracle TimesTen or SAP HANA, to name a few)...