Prasad Venkatachar – Sr Director Product | Solutions

TLDR: With this new Oracle database 21c and Pliops combined solution, we are
delivering a high-performance and highly scalable high-density Pluggable database
platform for fast and easy deployment to maximize IT infrastructure efficiency.

Oracle Database offers market-leading performance, scalability, reliability, and security,
both on-premises and in the cloud. The Oracle database 21c is focused on speeding up
transactional performance, and analytical applications, and enabling both without
requiring changes in applications.  Pliops is focused on enabling enterprises with a
simple and quick path to building a high-performance & highly reliable database
infrastructure with a database acceleration engine. Oracle database 21C provides an
early insight into many enhancements and many capabilities such as improved
multimodal support through in-database JavaScript, native blockchain tables, and
multi-workload improvements such as AutoML and sharding. As enterprises working to
adopt all these Oracle database innovations, we at Pliops working with Oracle to
accelerate the adoption by complementing these innovations with database storage
infrastructure.

Think about Database and Infrastructure scaling from the start.

Modern database infrastructure and applications must be able to scale to meet the ever-growing demands of businesses. This is true for all businesses of all sizes. The challenging part of building an application that can scale to meet enterprise growing needs is scaling the database storage without performance compromise. Whether it’s accommodating the data influx from an expanding customer base or seamlessly integrating additional databases for emerging business functionalities, scaling data and infrastructure is a daunting and often costly endeavor. last-minute attempts to retrofit scaling into an existing data infrastructure can prove immensely challenging, especially as the magnitude of the enterprise dataset grows in size and scale.

The most pragmatic approach? embed scalability at the genesis of the design, preempting future growth requirements.

The quick and fast path to a database scaling:

With this new Oracle database 21c and Pliops combined solution, we are delivering a high-performance and highly scalable high-density Pluggable database platform for fast and easy deployment to maximize IT infrastructure efficiency. To evaluate the combined benefits of Pliops and Oracle Database 21c for high-density pluggable database solutions, HammerDB4.7 OLTP testing was employed as shown in the figure below.

Oracle Database 21c with four pluggable database testing environments is configured on the Dell PowerEdge R750 server using the Oracle Linux 8.6 operating system with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK 5.4.17) version. The servers are set up with Intel 8368 38-Core processor and 1Tera Byte of Memory and storage is configured with 4 Gen4 Samsung PM9A3 3.84TB NVMe SSDs that are directly managed by Pliops XDP. To identify the multi-tenancy database capacity and performance of Pliops XDP, Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) is initially configured with internal redundancy with NVMe SSDs. Later, Oracle ASM is configured with external redundancy with Pliops providing the data protection for NVMe SSDs. To execute an OLTP workload, each PDB is loaded with 1TB of the HammerDB TPROC-C benchmark-configured dataset with 10,000 warehouses. Due to in-line data compression, Pliops XDP setup enabled to accommodate 6 pluggable databases compared to four pluggable databases without Pliops setup. More importantly, it exposes high-performance, highly reliable data storage volumes with built-in data protection to tolerate SSD failures. The Oracle solution brief can provide complete details of the setup and test results.

50% Higher PDB Consolidation with Pliops

After validating the database capacity enhancements facilitated by Pliops XDP, our immediate goal shifted towards gauging its performance enhancements. The Transactions per Minute metric was captured after executing the HammerDB TPROC benchmark for a 60-minute duration with four pluggable databases initially without Pliops XDP and compared with Pliops XDP setup. Subsequently, two pluggable databases were added to evaluate the aggregate performance gains with Pliops XDP. Not stopping at the basic HammerDB benchmark metrics, we delved deeper, capturing automatic workload repository (AWR) and active session history (ASH) reports. These offered insights into vital parameters like read and write latency, as well as CPU and IO metrics and their usage rationale. Furthermore, write amplification, a pivotal metric in understanding SSD durability and performance nuances, was also scrutinized. Drawing from my extensive experience with numerous Oracle clients, I was adamant that this solution validation adhered to the standard best practices and optimization strategies relating to a production workload environment. Pliops XDP doesn’t just deliver incrementally – it supercharges performance. There’s a massive 66% boost in aggregate performance, even with the provisioning of two extra pluggable databases. These results can attributed to the combined benefits of line rate compression, data compression, converting random writes to sequential writes, write amplification reduction, and faster data processing methodology as shown in the image below.

Database Backup Offloading with Pliops

Database backup and restoration is one of the main responsibilities of Oracle Database administrators to help ensure the databases are protected against storage media corruption or accidental deleting and truncating business-critical tables. We wanted to explore how Pliops XDP can be utilized not only as a database accelerator but also as database backup acceleration and offloading as shown in the figure below.

The additional 9TB of disk space exposed by Pliops XDP is leveraged to carve out ASM backup disks, and an ACFS file system is mounted to serve as the backup location for these pluggable databases.

Our testing aimed to ascertain the baseline performance metrics of Oracle Database backup and recovery operations, emphasizing minimal CPU consumption even with compressed backup enablement from Pliops XDP. Preliminary findings indicate that configurations augmented with Pliops XDP empower businesses to expedite backup and recovery tasks, thereby enhancing pivotal business systems’ recovery point objective (RTO). Subsequent experimentation revealed that the backup timeframe can be significantly reduced by leveraging Oracle Recovery Manager’s (RMAN) parallel functionalities and multi-channel deployment.

Key Takeaways

The combined solution benefit of Oracle Database 21C and Pliops XDP enables enterprises to address the following critical requirements and challenges for Oracle DBAs, Developers, and Server/storage administrators.

• How can I improve the database performance, latency, and throughput with minimum architectural changes?
• How can I scale with additional pluggable databases and increase aggregate performance gain?
• How do I economically scale the Oracle database footprint?
• How to optimize overall database operations that include Backup & recovery & provisioning of additional databases.
• How do I ensure all these benefits are well within the IT budget?

Thank you, Michele Resta, Christian Craft, Maruti Sharma, and Teri Whitaker for your invaluable support and insights in developing this Oracle Database solution.