Wednesday Sessions, Oct 01
Simplify Database Storage and Dev/Test Environments
- Oracle Snap manager for oracle is fully accessible through Enterprise Manager.
- The storage team are no longer required to create clones of database environments so huge cost savings can be had.
- The interface is designed to be database aware so is a natural task for the DBA rather than the Storage administrator.
- Virtually no limit to the number of clones that can be created
- Utilises thin clone techniques for copy on write or zero byte copies.
- Snapshots can be taken without any outage to the source system and is a sub second activity.
- Snap Restore allows for rapid rollback to a specific point in time.
- Snap Manager Utility (SMU)is a Java app that requires 2GB RAM and can be hosted in any virtual environment.
- Snap Manager supports Oracle 10g, 11g and RAC databases with 12c database support due soon.
- To take a snapshot the SMU queries the database to locate all of the files, puts the database into backup mode and then takes the snapshot before taking the database out of backup mode
- When the database is on Exadata the first copy is an RMan clone
- Key Features of Release (v1.2.0)
- ZFS now supports Active-Active storage heads
- Delegated user can now perform database and filesystem administration
- Concurrent database tasks can run simultaneously
- UI Enhancements, including a Cloning Wizard
- Question why is ZFS snapshot preferable to ACFS snapshot?
- Use case looking at a port form EMC VMAX storage where there were 5 copies of every production database.
- 60 databases
- 40TB storage
- 60 Servers
- 60TB space on SAN
- 60TB saving equated to $600K storage saving.
- Production has remained on the VMAX and dev/test is being done on ZFS
- Cut hardware and maintenance costs by 10x
- Project savings of $400K over the next 12 months across all projects
- 1 year in the number of test/development database has more than doubled from 60 - 110 but storage used has come down from 40TB to 20TB
- One side benefit has been that the server count has come down from 60 to 11 as much higher and simpler storage management becomes available.
Virtual Compute Appliance Product Roadmap and Cloud Implementations
- The OVCA is trying to get to the same place as an iPhone, power it on and go through some wizards and everything is automatically installed and configured, IaaS ready to go.
- Each network switch has 16 ports of 10Gb
- All of the components are common across all of the Engineered Systems family.
- The Virtual Compute Appliance Manager is the orchestrater for the environment and is the component that automatically configures the appliance on first boot.
- Platform cost includes all of the software licenses
- Networks
- Virtualisation
- Operating System
- Can be incorporated into an existing Enterprise Manager topography.
- OVCA Expansion racks are on the way, this will allow for the addition of another 2 racks with 32 compute nodes each
- This will be fully upward compatible with future servers
- There is a SPARC version coming
- External IB connected ZFS is now available
- As is Internal Private Interconnects which give Infiniband backplane speeds
- 90 minutes from first power on to production ready
- Has been live for 6 months without a single outage.
- First customer went from 16 physical cores to 4 vCPUs with a 2x performance increase.
- Hardware component prices are within 1% for the OVCA and the components.
- 10 minutes to add a new node and put it into production
- Supports VPN with SSL for multi tenancy.
- 11 TB usable on board, which is very fast.
- 45 VM's running at lower than 25% utilisation
- Dell to Oracle Intel servers were within $10K of cost over 5 years TCO
- Looks like trusted partitions for OVCA is 4 vCPUs per Oracle license.