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Better Oracle Performance in a Flash

Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) have made a big splash in the storage world over the past 2 years.  Many customers are interested in how they might apply this new technology to speed up applications.  And given a cost of roughly 20 times that of the same size 15K Fibre Channel (FC) drive, they want to be sure they can get a good return on their investment.  Finding the right targets to make that happen can be fairly simple.

The Problem

A retail customer purchased a set of 8 EFDs with a new array.  They had a few systems that were critical to their overall operations that they were hoping to improve.  The business would get the most value from an improvement in the PeopleSoft HR batch runs, ensuring that payroll computations were completed on time.  They had upgraded to new HP-UX servers, and found that they were now usually waiting for disk I/O.

The systems had been running on a CLARiiON CX3 array with dedicated groups of 15K FC drives.  They were to be moved to a new Symmetrix DMX-4 which had the EFDs.  The natural discussion was what data to place on this valuable EFD space.

Big Warehouse, Small Backup

This customer has a data warehouse that drives internal research and is sold to external customers.  The data needs to be accurate and available at all times.  Their goal was a new storage architecture to maximize availability and data protection while optimizing operational complexity and cost.  We were able to help them meet those goals.

The Problem

The starting size of the data warehouse was 25 TB, which would increase by about 10% per year.  This was for 2 years of retained data.  Some data was available to load throughout the day, while other sources would provide bulk feeds during the night.  With 2 years of retention, the change rate for the database was under 2% per week.  In general, backups every few days were OK, since there was a separate record of all data imported into the system and the ‘current’ image could be recreated from even a few day old copy within a matter of hours.

The business required that the data be available, and that backups be able to restore the system to a point in time up to 1 year old (there had been times of some small feeds of errant data that were corrected weeks later, so prudence dictated that extended recovery be possible).  Given the value of the operational system, there needed to be space to perform a full restore while continuing production operations.  This would also provide for space to conduct quarterly testing of the restore processes.

Given the value of the data, the business was interested in the option of having two full images of the data.  This would allow for quick resumption of production operations should there be an environmental or other event at the primary location.  This was, however, a desire with limited funding, and would only be included if it could be accomplished without greatly increasing the cost of the solution.

Looking to the future, there would be business value in being able to extend the data retention period from 2 years to 5 or even 7 years.  The more the solution is able to scale at reasonable cost and without driving up complexity, the sooner it would be cost effective to keep the data active in the warehouse for a longer period of time.

Enterprise Business Restart

Recovering a single system after a disaster can be difficult.  Recovering hundreds is a mess.  Recovering them in a consistent fashion, so that their data dependencies are all correct, is a huge task.  And what if they run different operating systems?  There is an effective answer.

The Problem

This customer has over 1,000 separate systems that are critical to ongoing operations and are located in a core data center.  The systems are a combination of Mainframe, UNIX variations (AIX, HP-UX, LINUX, etc.), and Windows.  They use SAN and NAS storage (the Mainframe CKD over FICON I include in the SAN), with over half a Petabyte of unique data and various additional copies.  They have SAP and other systems that have data flowing between different them, often with different operating systems, with no easy way to perform data isolation (picture an interaction of web services, shipping, billing, and warehouse data and you get the general idea).  The customer wanted to implement business restart, with clear business requirements.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

There is value in having the data during any site recovery be as current as possible.  These are not public finance systems, so the value of a minute of data was not measured in millions of dollars, but it has real corporate value.  The goal was set to lose less than 5 minutes of data.