In my last post I covered some settings to ensure you get the best performance from your XtremIO when running an Oracle workload.  When running any type of workload on XtremIO it’s a given that it will perform well, but what about helping us manage capacity as well? XtremIO offers inline deduplication, which we can leverage to save capacity without sacrificing performance. Any lun created on XtremIO will be thin provisioned at a 4k-granularity level.  That’s all well a good, but we know Oracle and thin provisioning aren’t exactly best friends so this won’t buy us a lot. XtremIO, however, does have an inline global deduplication that we can leverage to our benefit. Like thin provisioning this feature also operates at a 4k-granularity.  What that’s means is only unique 4k blocks consume physical capacity. How can we best use that to our benefit? The short answer is multiple copies of the same data. These copies can beRead More →

By:
On:
In: Storage

XtremIO is EMC’s all-flash scale out storage array designed to delivery the full performance of flash. The array is designed for 4k random I/O, low latency, inline data reduction, and even distribution of data blocks.  This even distribution of data blocks leads to maximum performance and minimal flash wear.  You can find all sorts of information on the architecture of the array, but I haven’t seen much talking about archive maximum performance from an Oracle database on XtremIO. The nature of XtremIO ensures that’s any Oracle workload (OLTP, DSS, or Hybrid) will have high performance and low latency, however we can maximize performance with some configuration options.  Most of what I’ll be talking about is around RAC and ASM on Redhat Linux 6.x in a Fiber Channel Storage Area Network. A single XtremIO X-Brick has two storage controllers. Each storage controller has two fiber channel ports. Best practices are two have two HBAs in your host andRead More →

By:
On:
In: Storage

With the announcement of ViPR 2.0 EMC is bringing some improvements and new features to EMC’s Software Defined Storage Software offering. The new and improved ViPR has major steps towards supporting a geo-distributed datacenter.  For object storage your multi-site geo-replicated ViPR environment will now be presented as a single global namespace.  The world of Active/Active writes is supported with strong consistency using a distributed erasure coding system, so you no longer have to choose between performance and redundancy.  Objects are now cut into chucks and stored in containers, this type of hybrid encoding allows for a very low storage overhead.  To allow for WAN optimized geo-disperse active/active traffic, ViPR looks for access patents and uses this information to accelerate the process. Object access is done via S3, Swift, or the Atmos API.  Another change in the object space brings the Centera API as ViPR CAS.  Today ViPR only supports the API, but a future release will allowRead More →

By:
On:
In: Storage