Information sought on running the Oracle DB on SSD's or using an SSD as an Oracle Flash Cache

[GaryMansell]

I am looking to update my old Oracle Server running 10gr2 to a shiny new one running 11gr2 when I upgrade to Windchill 10.1 shortly.

I currently run RAID 10 disks for the DB but am wondering on using SSD's either for hosting the whole DB or to use one as an Oracle Flash Cache. It seems Dell supply PCIe SSD's which sound pretty interesting.

Has anyone experience of this and can anyone advise whether this sort of thing is worth doing for Windchill's Oracle DB or are there other bottlenecks to consider.

My existing Oracle H/W is this:

HP ProLiant DL360 G5

2x Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor X5355 – 2.66GHz

RAM 8 GB (PC2-5300 2x4GB Kit)

Server Storage: 6 x 146GB 10K SAS 2.5'' - 2x146GB disks RAID 1 for OS and 4x 146GB disks RAID 10 for DB

Redhat Enterprise Linux 4 (No VMware layer)

Oracle 10gR2 DB

My proposed Oracle H/W is this:

PowerEdge R720 2U Server

2x 8 core 2.6 Ghz Processors

64 GB RAM

8x 300 GB 15K SAS Drives with PERC H710P 1GB Controller configured for RAID10 = 1 TB

Virtualised with VMware and running RHEL 6.3

Oracle 11gr2

My oracle DB is currently about 60 GB but will probably grow to over 100Gb this hardware refresh.

I was thinking that it might be better just to throw loads of RAM (maybe 128GB) in the machine rather than invest in SSD technology?

I do force archive log mode on as I use DBvisit to log ship to a passive standby database - so perhaps this means that fast disk would be a good idea as this may well be the current bottleneck in performance?

Any suggestions/advice welcomed.

Rgds

Gary

[IgorVarshavsky]

Hi Gary,

Huge server memory will not improve your performance much with classical Oracle database that is heavily using hard disks by design.
Yes, the performance will improve over time as database will cache stuff but the first access will be bonded by disk speed anyways.
Actually Oracle has a relatively new product "Times Ten" that is in-memory database or caching add-on to a classical database that improves performance by pre-caching all database into RAM. PTC does not have any official support on that product. Also it is very expensive.
In case of standard Windchill Oracle database SSD array will be a better choice over (or combined with) very large RAM.

Best regards,
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Igor Varshavsky
Senior Application Specialist