DATA SHEET

The Value of EMC Symmetrix in an Oracle Environment

IntroductionIT organizations deploying Oracle applications, middleware, or database software are increasingly

seeking new ways to drive toward infrastructure consolidation, maximized and sustainable

performance, and greater ease of administration. In addition, many organizations are deploying

virtualization in support of targeted environments within their Oracle eco-systems, including

development, test, and in some cases, production.

EMC® Symmetrix® V-Max™ is the newest addition to the Symmetrix product family, designed for the

virtual data center. Built on the strategy of simple, intelligent, modular storage, it incorporates a new

scalable EMC Virtual Matrix™ interface that connects all shared resources across all V-Max Engines—

enabling the storage array to seamlessly grow from an entry-level configuration into the world’s largest

storage system, best suited for Oracle scale-out and scale-up OLTP and data warehouse solutions.

Oracle Database Development itself runs EMC Symmetrix. Symmetrix was a beta partner for the

Oracle11g Release 2, with early testing conducted using pre-GA beta code to harden Oracle11g R2

on EMC Symmetrix solutions for customers.

EMC Symmetrix and Oracle Database Development have tested and documented joint best practices

and proven solutions for the Oracle11g Database Grid platform with EMC’s core offerings and newest

technologies, including Enterprise Flash drives. The following is a summary of the key benefits of EMC

Symmetrix for Oracle environments:

• Optimized architecture

• Auto-provisioning

• Availability

• Tiered storage automation

• Performance monitoring

Optimized architecture for the Oracle Database

Oracle11g Database grid consolidationThe Symmetrix V-Max system enables massive consolidation and incremental scalability, so you get

all the benefits of tiered storage on one platform, as well as the flexibility to rapidly address the

changing needs of your business.

The base system consists of one director pair and up to 96 drives, and grows to a maximum of eight

director pairs and 2400 drives, scaling to over two petabytes in a single platform.

Symmetrix Enginuity maximizing Oracle performanceOver time, Oracle performance requirements will change. It is important for the underlying storage

architecture to dynamically adjust resources to optimize performance. Symmetrix V-Max contains

EMC Enginuity® software, designed to move massive amounts of database and application data at

exceptionally high speeds. The advanced Enginuity algorithms maximize Symmetrix performance for

servicing databases and applications by keeping the most frequently used data in Symmetrix cache,

and moving the least frequently used data to disk when memory becomes full.

These Enginuity algorithms are based on a comprehensive analysis of I/O usage patterns based on

thousands of Symmetrix systems installed at customer sites, predicting what data will be needed

next and making it available in Symmetrix memory before the Oracle application requests it.

Symmetrix V-Max also contains a new, innovative Virtual Matrix architecture allowing for CPU, memory, disks, and host ports to be shared across all directors within the platform.

IT organizations can therefore incrementally add Symmetrix director pairs to scale out storage resources within the Symmetrix V-Max and/or add additional platforms.

This allows for cost-efficient scaling of resources in support of Oracle database and application growth in both single instance or Oracle Grid “scale-out” computing environments.

Oracle Optimized Warehouse InitiativeDeploying Oracle databases in data warehouse environments involves particular I/O characteristics

which if not properly addressed, can lead to performance challenges. Oracle formed the Optimized

Warehouse Initiative to work with partners to deliver pre-installed and pre-configured data

warehouse solutions utilizing the enterprise-class capabilities of Oracle Database 10g and 11g

Enterprise Editions and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC). Working with EMC Symmetrix

engineering, Oracle has developed dozens of Oracle Optimized Warehouse configurations to scale-up

or scale-out, and provide configuration and deployment best practices.

Oracle Unbreakable LinuxIncreasing numbers of Oracle customers are adopting Linux as a means to reduce cost and increase

flexibility. EMC is a founding partner in the Oracle Unbreakable Linux Program, testing Oracle

Enterprise Linux (OEL) across all of EMC’s storage platforms and much of our software. We have

created “validated configurations” with Oracle to speed and reduce the risk of moving to Linux.

Simplified provisioning

EMC Symmetrix V-Max and Oracle RAC—90 percent faster provisioningOnce an Oracle environment is deployed, it will grow over time. The process of provisioning new

resources from the storage platform to meet performance and scalability requirements can be time

consuming and complex. This can be particularly challenging in Oracle RAC environments running

multiple instances across shared storage.

Symmetrix V-Max provides for Auto-provisioning Groups simplifying storage provisioning for Oracle

database single instance and RAC environments. It simplifies and shortens mapping of devices for

small- and large-scale environments. The storage provisioning that may take many steps with other

storage systems can now be accomplished with just a few simple and intuitive operations with

Symmetrix.

Auto-provisioning Groups is built on the notion of ‘storage groups,’ ‘initiator groups,’ ‘port groups,’

and the views that combine the groups together. Storage groups are populated with Symmetrix

devices. Port groups are populated with the array front-end adapter (FA) port numbers, and initiator

groups are populated with host bus adapter (HBA) WWN information.

By simply combining storage, initiator, and port groups into views, the device masking operations

take place automatically across the view. Consider a scenario with five Oracle RAC servers, each

leveraging two HBAs and four storage ports. On a non-EMC storage platform, the result would be 40

individual masking operations. If each of the operations takes four clicks, this would take 160 clicks

to complete. Auto-provisioning Groups would reduce this down to about 15 clicks to complete,

making it 90 percent faster.

AvailabilityOnce an Oracle database is deployed, EMC Symmetrix V-Max includes several features to keep the

system available during planned or unplanned activities.

Symmetrix V-Max hardware redundancySymmetrix V-Max includes complete system hardware protection with redundant components

inclusive of the V-Max Engines, memory, front-end host connections, host to Symmetrix I/O path

management and failover provided by EMC PowerPath® and dual access to each Symmetrix drive

for back-end I/O operations ensuring 24x7 Oracle application and database availability.

Non-disruptive changes and upgradesThe Symmetrix Enginuity software enables non-disruptive changes, upgrades, and maintenance

activities while Oracle applications continue to support business requirements with minimal

performance degradation, if any, for the least amount of time. These activities could include adding

RAC host addresses for additional scaling, performing in-family Enginuity upgrades, and adding

disaster recovery capabilities with the EMC SRDF ® software family.

SRDF and Open Systems Clusters for automated Oracle disaster recoverySRDF provides remote mirroring independent of the host and operating system, application, and

database. SRDF remote mirroring helps companies manage planned and unplanned outages for

365x24x7 data availability, enabling businesses to focus on maximizing revenue generation and

customer support opportunities, improve productivity, and control or reduce costs for increased

competitive advantage.

Working with HP, IBM, Sun, and with the EMC provided SRDF/Cluster Enabler (CE) for Microsoft®

Failover Clusters, SRDF has been integrated, providing automatic or semi-automatic site failover

in Oracle singl-instance and/or Oracle RAC environments.

Oracle single-instance solutions include:

• SRDF with HP MetroCluster and HP Continental Clusters

• SRDF with IBM PowerHA for AIX

• SRDF with Solaris Cluster Campus Topology and Geographic Edition

• SRDF/CE for Microsoft Failover Clusters

Oracle RAC solutions include:

• SRDF with HP MetroRAC and Continental Clusters

• SRDF with Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition

Different multi-instance RAC databases can be running concurrently at each site, with no impact to

the performance of RAC’s Cache Fusion network due to distance.

Tiered storage automationOver time, the value of Oracle data will change from active, to less-active, to archival data. EMC

Symmetrix V-Max includes new functionality to allow for transparent tiering of storage to reduce and

control costs through the use of virtual LUNs.

It could then be used to move the data to SATA drives after month-end to keep the data online and

available—but leverage a more cost-effective tier that matched the lower performance requirements.

Integrated performance monitoringOngoing performance monitoring and tuning of Oracle environments is a key requirement as Oracle

workload profiles adjust over time. DBAs and storage administrators need an integrated view of

storage and the database to enable them to better collaborate on tasks such as capacity planning,

performance root-cause analysis, and optimizing storage configurations for optimal performance.An example of this integration includes SRDF with HP MetroRAC, comprised of an Oracle RAC database environment with multiple nodes running the same multi-instance database, providing automatic site failover.

EMC CorporationHopkintonMassachusetts01748-91031-508-435-1000In North America 1-866-464-7381www.EMC.com

Take the next stepFor more information and a listing of all EMC’s Oracle Solutions portfolio, visit www.EMC.com/solutions/oracle.

Oracle Enterprise Manager system monitoring plug-ins for Symmetrix To simplify performance tuning for Oracle DBAs, Oracle has developed system monitoring plug-ins for

Symmetrix. These plug-ins are available for download from www.oracle.com. Once deployed, they can

be used to prioritize among many different types of performance characteristics of the Symmetrix, and

collect and display this information directly through the Oracle Enterprise Manager native console.

Information collected includes host adapters, disk adapters, front-end ports, back-end directors, and

storage LUNs.

Combining this view with performance data about the database and host allows the DBA to have a

comprehensive view of where underlying performance issues may be occurring.

EMC Symmetrix Performance OptimizerComplementing the Oracle system monitoring plug-ins, EMC has advanced performance-management

tools to dynamically adjust EMC Symmetrix resources to map to each Oracle database’s performance needs.

Once a performance issue is identified by the Oracle system monitoring plug-ins, EMC Symmetrix

Optimizer enables storage administrators to identify which components of the Symmetrix storage

system are experiencing the longest wait times, as well as to identify other LUNs which are less

utilized. Optimizer can then redeploy Oracle Database data across underutilized LUNs to balance out

performance and alleviate long wait times on the over-utilized LUNs.

EMC Double Checksum softwareThis product incorporates Oracle’s data validation solution into Symmetrix for a true end-to-end

safeguard against data corruption. Double Checksum for Oracle monitors data integrity from the

database to the disk, enabling instant verification of data correctness. And faster error detection

means faster data recovery time, reducing the cost of downtime to an absolute minimum.

EMC Solutions Practice for OracleEMC has a dedicated Oracle Solutions Practice consisting of technical experts trained in Oracle and EMC

technology. The Solutions Practice for Oracle leverages a portfolio of proven solutions developed in real-

world testing facilities across the world, consisting of reference architectures and configuration guides.

These solutions have been extensively tested over a series of months providing proven guidance on

deploying EMC Symmetrix and Oracle environments, but contain flexibility of choice in terms of

server, operating system, and Oracle database options to be deployed.

EMC2, EMC, Enginuity, PowerPath, SRDF, Symmetrix, V-Max, Virtual Matrix, and where information lives are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. © Copyright 2009 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 12/09 Data Sheet H6846

Symmetrix Virtual LUNVirtual LUN migration technology enables users to move Symmetrix logical devices between disk types, such as high-performance Enterprise Flash drives (EFDs), Fibre Channel drives, or high-capac-ity, low-cost SATA drives. As devices are migrated, they can change their RAID protection.

An example use of this is an Oracle ERP applica-tion which experiences a spike in workload due to end-month processing. Virtual LUN would allow the data to be moved from Fibre Channel to Flash drives to complete month-end processing when workloads are at their peak.

Deal Registration Process(in average days)

V-LUN

FibreChannel

Any RAID Type

SATAAny RAID Type

V-LUN

FlashAny RAID Type

New Enginuity 5874