NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP with Oracle Databases

Lab Validation Report NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP with Oracle Databases

Easy, Dynamic, and Proven Solutions

By Vinny Choinski, Senior ESG Lab Analyst and Kerry Dolan, ESG Lab Analyst

January 2013 © 2013 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Lab Validation: NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP with Oracle Databases 2

© 2013 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Contents

Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 3 Background ............................................................................................................................................................... 3 NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP ................................................................................................................................ 4 Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) ....................................................................................................... 4 Combining NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP and Oracle ASM or dNFS...................................................................... 4

ESG Lab Validation ........................................................................................................................................ 6 Getting Started ......................................................................................................................................................... 6 Non-disruptive Operation......................................................................................................................................... 9 Efficient Scale.......................................................................................................................................................... 11

ESG Lab Validation Highlights ..................................................................................................................... 14

Issues to Consider ....................................................................................................................................... 14

The Bigger Truth ......................................................................................................................................... 15

Appendix ..................................................................................................................................................... 16

All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard-copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at 508.482.0188.

ESG Lab Reports

The goal of ESG Lab reports is to educate IT professionals about data center technology products for companies of all types and sizes. ESG Lab reports are not meant to replace the evaluation process that should be conducted before making purchasing decisions, but rather to provide insight into these emerging technologies. Our objective is to go over some of the more valuable features/functions of products, show how they can be used to solve real customer problems and identify any areas needing improvement. ESG Lab's expert third-party perspective is based on our own hands-on testing as well as on interviews with customers who use these products in production environments. This ESG Lab report was sponsored by NetApp.



Introduction

This ESG Lab Validation report documents the results of hands-on testing of NetApp clustered Data ONTAP in Oracle database environments, with a focus on ease of management, non-disruptive operations, and efficient scaling.

Background

Integrated computing solutions are created when two or more components or features of the infrastructure work together to provide greater value for the end-user. ESG research respondents indicated that they believe that simplified management, reduced time to deployment, and achievement of a better economic model through lower TCO were all benefits of integrated computing platforms, with those three benefits being the most popular answers (see Figure 1). ESG research further indicates that organizations that have already deployed integrated solutions are more likely to report benefits across the board than potential adopters are, further validating the value of integrated platforms.1

Figure 1. Benefits of Integrated Computing Platforms

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2012.

Operational benefits are the real drivers of integrated solutions. Features that work together can simplify management and enable new capabilities. Today’s dynamic IT environments must be able to support continual growth, high availability, and mobility of physical and virtual workloads. These requirements are often difficult to execute and can complicate the deployment and management of infrastructure components. As a result, integration and high-level orchestration are extremely beneficial and can dramatically reduce operational efforts for smaller or less experienced IT staffs as well as large enterprises. Integration can make the whole greater than the sum of the parts, and that means users win in the end.

1 Source: ESG Research Brief, Integrated Computing Trends, March 2011.

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Ease of management

What benefits do you believe an integrated computing platform offers your organization? (Percent of respondents, N=471, multiple responses accepted)

http://www.esg-global.com/research-briefs/research-brief-integrated-computing-trends/



NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP

The latest version of NetApp’s unified SAN/NAS storage operating system was designed for the always-on availability, on-demand flexibility, efficient operations, and seamless scalability that today’s dynamic and growing business environments require. As organizations move toward a shared IT infrastructure model, they must be able to scale easily and move data around to optimize performance and utilization, but without disruption or added complexity.

Several key features of this release are designed to support non-disruptive operations, massive scalability, and better management of large-scale deployments. These include:

DataMotion for Volumes, software that enables non-disruptive movement of storage volumes within a storage cluster. Hardware and software can be upgraded while the storage pool is active, and workloads can be re-balanced (while clients and applications maintain data access) by moving volumes to less active aggregates or nodes to avoid hotspots and improve service levels.

Storage virtualization across as many as 24 nodes (12 high-availability controller pairs) that are managed as a single logical storage pool and name space. This enables almost limitless scalability even for data intensive environments.

Support for multiple hardware and software generations in the same cluster for investment protection.

Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM)

ASM is a feature of the Oracle database that provides integrated cluster file system and volume management capabilities on SAN storage. ASM virtualizes the database storage into disk groups and automates placement of database files within those disk groups. It load balances I/O by distributing the contents of each data file evenly across the storage pool, optimizing performance and utilization, and eliminating the need for downtime to manually tune database I/O. DBAs can locate and alleviate I/O hot spots, add disks, and remove disks without taking the database offline, and when data movement is complete, ASM automatically rebalances the load.

NFS and Oracle Direct NFS (dNFS) Environments

All features of NetApp clustered Data ONTAP are supported for NFS and Oracle dNFS environments. Oracle dNFS is built into the database kernel (as ASM is for SAN storage), and provides faster access and better scalability with NFS storage on NAS devices. With dNFS, Oracle databases gain faster performance than with a standard NFS driver, since dNFS bypasses the operating system when generating requests and does not need user configuration or tuning. In addition, it load balances across multiple network interfaces in a similar fashion to how ASM operates in SAN environments.

Combining NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP and Oracle ASM or dNFS

When used in combination, these NetApp clustered Data ONTAP and Oracle ASM/dNFS features enable non-disruptive data movement to optimize database performance and improve service levels. Clustered Data ONTAP supports non-disruptive data movement between active aggregates and cluster nodes, while ASM or dNFS further load balance across multiple volumes or nodes. The result is optimal read/write performance in high transaction database environments.



Figure 2 shows an integrated SAN infrastructure. On the left side of the graphic, an Oracle Database instance with ASM resides on Red Hat Linux. It is SAN-connected to a NetApp VServer, which is divided up into LUNs that reside in volumes. These volumes can be moved non-disruptively between aggregates and nodes within a NetApp storage cluster.

Figure 2. NetApp Oracle SAN Solution

Figure 3 shows an integrated NAS infrastructure. On the left side of the graphic, an Oracle Database instance with dNFS resides on Red Hat Linux. It is NAS-connected to a NetApp VServer, which is divided up into NFS file exports that reside in volumes. These volumes can also be moved non-disruptively between aggregates and nodes within a NetApp storage cluster

Figure 3. NetApp Oracle NAS Solution



ESG Lab Validation

ESG Lab performed hands-on evaluation and testing of the clustered Data ONTAP with Oracle 11g solution at the NetApp Research Triangle Park facility, in RTP, North Carolina. Testing was designed to demonstrate ease of setup and management via the OnCommand user interface; how DataMotion features can be leveraged to architect a solution that provides non-disruptive operation; and how all the features of both the NetApp storage and the Oracle database can be combined to create an environment that scales efficiently.

Getting Started

ESG Lab began its exploration of the solution with a review of the environment leveraged for the subsequent testing. As shown in Figure 4, the test bed was configured with a SAN- and NAS-attached NetApp storage device as shown on the right. An Oracle 11g database was deployed in a Linux server, as shown in the middle of the figure. On the left side of Figure 4 is the LAN-connected OLTP workload host. The storage component consisted of six FAS devices, four FAS3270, and two FAS6240 nodes. The SAN was composed of two Brocade 16 port switches. For servers we used Linux Red Hat for the Oracle database and Windows 2008 to run the OLTP workload.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab used the OnCommand user interface to connect to and inventory the storage components of the test bed. A review of the configuration was conducted including NetApp deployment procedures and terminology. The Lab confirmed the setup of any preconfigured components and completed any final configuration tasks. The provisioning of storage to the Oracle database was confirmed by connecting to the Linux host and finally, the OLTP workloads generator was explored via a remote connection to the Windows host.

Figure 4. Clustered Data ONTAP and Oracle 11g with ASM Test Bed



ESG Lab conducted a detailed review of the clustered Data ONTAP configuration and completed the final configuration of components for each phase of configuration. Figure 5 shows the OnCommand view of the critical components for the validation test environment. Starting on the left, Figure 5 shows cluster node information—the cluster name TESO is displayed in the upper left of the first pane. Configured within the cluster are the six FAS devices described in the test bed Figure 3. They are assigned the names TESO-01 through TESO-O4 and TESO-17 and TESO-18. Each cluster node has an aggregate created on it and labeled to reflect its node location (e.g., aggr_data_N1 is on TESO-01). Next, as shown in the middle pane of Figure 5, are the volumes that were created for the test environment.

Figure 5. Storage and Cluster Layout

The volumes were created and labeled to show their original location whereas volume asmdata2 was initially created on aggregate aggr_data_N2. Next, LUNs were created for the actual Oracle database data. The LUNs are shown in the far right pane in Figure 5. The LUNs are named data1 through data4, data17, and data18.

Finally, in order to abstract their aggregate location, the LUNs were provisioned to the Linux Oracle host through a VServer or virtual cluster server named sanrac.



In order to conduct subsequent operations and scale testing, ESG Lab leveraged the Move Volume feature from the OnCommand user interface, as shown in Figure 6. In Figure 6 we see the volume asmdata03 being moved from aggr_data_N1 to aggr_data_N3.

Figure 6. Volume Move

Why This Matters

IT professionals operate with constrained resources of many kinds, and time is often a key one. Installing, configuring, and managing efficient and flexible scale-out storage solutions can be extremely complex and time-consuming. It is a rarity for IT staff members to have the luxury of spare time to re-learn or muddle their way through complex, unintuitive storage management tools or to fully qualify the interpretability of business applications and compute infrastructures.

ESG Lab confirmed that creating and managing resources with the NetApp OnCommand user interface was straightforward and easy. The simple concepts of applying aggregate RAID sets, volumes, and LUNs to clustered Data ONTAP environments make management easy for both current NetApp users moving from an older version of ONTAP as well as the storage administrator new to NetApp. The easy interface combined with NetApp verified architecture and best practice guides accelerate deployment, ultimately saving time and money by reducing operating expenses.



Non-disruptive Operation

Non-disruptive operation is the ability to move the physical location of storage while maintaining end-user access to the application that lives on that storage. For this validation, the application is an Oracle 11g database with simulated online transaction end-user activity. The storage is a multi-node NetApp cluster running version 8.1.1 of clustered Data ONTAP and consisting of four FAS3270 nodes for this phase of validation.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab tested the ability of the solution to deliver non-disruptive operation by running the OLTP workload and observing continued access as the volumes and LUN locations were moved in the environment. As shown in Figure 7, CPU utilization was measured before, during, and after distributing database LUNs across all four nodes.

Figure 7. Two to Four Node Cluster Scale-out CPU Utilization

What the Numbers Mean

The left (Before) side of Figure 7 shows the CPU utilization of the cluster with the OLTP workload and with all LUNs provisioned on (FAS3270_1 and FAS3270_2).

The middle (During) of Figure 7 shows the CPU utilization during the actual volume move. The workload remains running with its load and the overhead of the volume move distributed across all four nodes.

The right (After) side of Figure 7 shows a much more distributed and well under 10% CPU utilization for the OLTP workload with the volume move complete and the LUNs provisioned across all filers.

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NetApp Cluster, Node Scale-out, CPU Utilization (Oracle OLTP 100 User Work Load with FC Storage)

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ESG Lab then explored the performance characteristics of the environment during the non-disruptive scale-out procedure. As shown in Figure 8, the transactions per minute and response times of the OLTP workload were examined as the environment was scaled from two to four nodes.

Figure 8. Two to Four Node Cluster Scale-out Throughput and Response Times


Figure 8 shows that the number of transactions per minute improved with the addition of a second pair of FAS3270 nodes.

Figure 8 also shows a significant reduction in application response time with all four nodes active. The reduction in response time equates to a faster user experience.

There is a slight dip in the number of transactions and an increase in response time during the actual volume move but the application remains accessible to users during this process.

Why This Matters

Service interruptions can have a major impact on business productivity, especially for infrastructures supporting mission-critical applications or highly virtualized environments. Most environments are designed with redundancy to protect against and survive common hardware failures, but sometimes interruptions are caused by routine maintenance or configuration changes. Simple equipment upgrades, firmware updates, and hardware refreshes, though typically planned, can require equipment be taken out of service and often take longer than expected.

Today, IT’s customers are more mobile and global than ever before and as such expect their applications and data to be available 24x7. Interruptions, whether planned or unplanned, can have a major impact to the bottom line of the business. ESG Lab tested the ability of clustered Data ONTAP to seamlessly move data volumes between aggregates and filers while maintaining database access and keeping applications available to the business. The solution can help keep businesses running along smoothly while providing peace of mind to the administrators who have to manage it.

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Efficient Scale

Efficient scale is the process of demonstrating how clustered Data ONTAP DataMotion for Volumes combined with Oracle ASM features can seamlessly and non-disruptively scale database environments to support a growing number of concurrent users. An OLTP workload that simulates a computing environment where users execute transactions against a database is used as the test harness. The workload is centered on order-entry transactions for industries that manage, sell, or distribute products or services. The workload used in this validation was configured to show linear scalability; it was not intended to push the performance boundaries of the solution.

ESG Lab Testing

ESG Lab tested efficient scale by increasing the number of database users from 100 to 300 in hundred-user increments for two, four, and six node cluster configurations while measuring the performance. As shown in Figure 9, the number of transactions per minute was measured as the database storage was distributed across nodes. Figure 9 shows how performance increased for the environment as cluster nodes were added and storage volumes were spread across the nodes.

Figure 9. Two, Four, and Six Node Cluster Transactions per Minute



Next, as shown in Figure 10, ESG Lab analyzed response time using the same scale methodology applied during throughput testing. In Figure 10, we see the response times as the volume distribution is scaled from two to six nodes.

Figure 10. Two, Four, and Six Node Cluster Response Times


Figure 10 shows that the response times exceed two seconds as the number of users is increased to 300 in the 2 node cluster configuration.

As the workload is distributed across more nodes, the response time decreases. In the four-node configuration, the response time is between 1 and 1.5 seconds.

As the final six-node configuration is deployed, the response time drops to well under .5 seconds.



Finally, as shown in Figure 11, ESG Lab audited NetApp workload testing results with NFS storage and dNFS on the Oracle host.

Figure 11. Four Node Cluster, Scale Up Users, Throughput and Response Times


The cluster configuration in this test was similar to that of the six-node FC configuration. Transactions per minute were approximately equal for both the NAS and SAN configuration. Response times in the NAS configuration were faster than that of the SAN configuration.

Why This Matters

Resource contention and configuration constraints are daily occurrences in today’s dynamic data centers. They can cause performance and availability problems that threaten IT’s ability to deliver on application service level agreements. Business-critical applications can grow quickly in both capacity and user workload. Performance degradation can arise from oversubscribed or misconfigured arrays as application attributes change. This can quickly impact end-user productivity especially in rigid, inflexible architectures.

ESG Lab validated that, by abstracting the environment at both the storage and application level using clustered Data ONTAP and Oracle 11g with ASM or dNFS, we could dynamically change and scale the environment to improve performance during this process. This flexibility can help avoid CAPEX expenditures for dedicated appliances that would be only fractionally utilized during the majority of the year by enabling hot applications to be distributed across multiple filers or moved to higher performance models during times of higher utilization, such as month-end or year-end processing, and then be moved back when the load returns to normal.



ESG Lab Validation Highlights

ESG Lab was pleased to find the solution extremely easy to configure and manage. The OnCommand user interface made it really easy to conduct the tasks at hand and the concepts were intuitive and familiar.

Leveraging best practice and reference architecture recommendations, the Lab was able to configure a solution that allowed non-disruptive movement of data volumes between storage cluster members, an architecture that demonstrated its ability to eliminate service interruptions during simple maintenance tasks through complex configuration changes.

With clustered Data ONTAP and Oracle 11g with ASM, ESG Lab was able to seamlessly dial up and dial back performance as application workload requirements changed. The solution enables a very granular approach to performance tuning, allowing Oracle ASM data volumes to be mapped to specific NetApp volumes on specific aggregates when performance requirements demand such resources.

ESG Lab also validated that clustered Data ONTAP is a viable solution for Oracle Databases with NAS storage, leveraging Oracle dNFS for load balancing and additional performance.

ESG Lab was pleased to see cluster support for different filer models. This allows different FAS models with different workloads to be managed through a single cluster interface and consolidates the management process.

Issues to Consider

With the tested version of clustered Data ONTAP, members must be added in HA pairs. Proper planning must be considered to maintain desired performance metrics when selecting the HA pair for a cluster configuration.

Proper planning is essential when designing the Oracle ASM disk group. Greater distribution of data files at the ASM layer enables greater performance parallelisms as backend storage resources are added to the environment. However, performance must be balanced with reliable recovery. For proper disk layout in 8.1.1. ASM environments, NetApp strongly recommends users implement the design elements found in the NetApp solution guide.



The Bigger Truth

Business doesn’t want to wait for IT anymore. In the “old days,” business managers waited patiently while IT created or upgraded infrastructure components to deliver a particular feature or function. But today, they are laser-focused on productivity, revenue generation, and time to market, so delays and downtime are frowned upon. This is something of a dilemma for IT because the better and faster IT delivers services, the higher the expectations become. Once business managers experience the flexibility and agility benefits of technologies such as virtualization and cloud infrastructures, they assume that in all circumstances, IT can eliminate wait times for technology upgrades and can keep applications and data up and running around the clock.

What business managers are not aware of are the innovations that vendors are building into their technology solutions to generate this agility and flexibility and make it appear seamless. All they know is that systems don’t slow down during the holiday rush any more, that quarterly financial reporting doesn’t bump their applications to lower service levels, and that IT no longer has to answer, “Sure we can make it faster, but only if we take the system down for a couple of days.”

As ESG Lab discovered during this testing, the combination of NetApp clustered Data ONTAP and DataMotion features with Oracle ASM creates an environment in which business-critical databases can deliver optimal performance and scalability without disruption or downtime. ONTAP was simple to manage, and ESG Lab was able to scale-out and load balance the storage cluster to improve transactions per minute and response time. We were able to accomplish this with neither downtime nor any perceptible impact on performance during the data migration.

Certainly, this integrated technology solution is of great value to the business in terms of productivity and agility. At the same time, it benefits IT. In today’s cloud-focused architectures, silos of components become difficult to orchestrate. Having prequalified solution functionality such as this available without IT teams designing, testing, and qualifying it on their own saves time and money.

With NetApp and Oracle, IT can deliver the desired result without the interruption— just like the business has come to expect.



Appendix

Table 1. ESG Lab Test Bed

Storage

(4) FAS3270 Filers Data ONTAP version 8.1.1 (64) 400GB 10k SAS Drives

(2) FAS6240 Filers Data ONTAP version 8.1.1 (26) 550GB 15k SAS Drives

Servers

(2) Fujitsu Primergy Servers

Model: RX300 S5 2U dual socket rack server CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2600 product family RAM: 128GB

SAN

(2) Brocade 16 Port Switches Model: 300 Fabric OS: 6.3.0d Firmware: 2.16.4.2

Applications and Operating Systems

Oracle Database Version: 11g Automatic Storage Management Redundancy: External

Windows Version: 2008 R2

Linux Type: Red Hat Enterprise Version: 5.6

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NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP with Oracle Databases

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