ENHANCE YOUR ORACLE PERFORMANCE

Texas Memory Systems – Solid State Disk Technology
Enhanced Oracle Performance, as well as RamSan-400 and RamSan-300

Texas Memory Systems solid state disks have improved database environments for numerous customers over the company’s long history. What follows are the most popular and informative resources for Oracle DBAs considering solid state disk technology for their applications.

Free Oracle Statspack Analysis
The Oracle Statspack file gives you visibility into potential I/O bottlenecks. TMS sponsors StatspackAnalyzer.com’s free tool to upload your statspack and receive instant analysis of the results.

Identify Oracle Bottlenecks with Confio Ignite
Confio Ignite for Oracle is a performance tool used to identify and resolve performance problems in your Oracle databases and the applications that depend on them. Ignite uses industry best-practice Wait-Time methods to identify exactly which SQL and Wait-Event are causing delays in the application. TMS recommends Confio Ignite to help determine if your Oracle waits have an I/O cause, to identify the files creating delays, and to isolate other wait events affecting performance.

Recommended Reading
Written by the world’s most widely-read Oracle script developers and authors of over 50 best-selling Oracle books, Mike Ault, Robert Freeman, Don Burleson and John Garmany share their personal experience with using Solid-State RAM disk to hypercharge Oracle performance in Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle 10g Grid databases.

This book will show you how to leverage RamSan technology to create Oracle9i RAC databases with blistering speed. You will learn proven techniques for leveraging RAM disk in an Oracle RAC and Grid environment including changes to initialization parameters and the selective use of SSD in large database environments including UNDO, REDO and TEMP tablespaces on solid-state disk.

The book also shows actual TPC benchmark data and illustrates the high-bandwidth capabilities of SSD that revolutionize data retrieval engines.

ELIMINATE WAIT TIME

TMS’s non-volatile RAM drives eliminate I/O wait time in storage and accelerate application performance in any I/O or bandwidth intensive environment.

RamSan solid state disks provide superior performance to any cached RAID solution, exhibit higher levels of reliability than conventional storage, and include more high-availability features than competing SSDs.

RamSan-400 highlights:

• First solid state disk with 4Gb Fibre Channel interfaces.
• First solid state disk with 4x InfiniBand interfaces.
• Over 400,000 random I/Os per second.
• 3000 MB/s random sustained external throughput.

RamSan-300 highlights:

• Over 200,000 random I/Os per second.
• 1500 MB/s random sustained external throughput.

Soft Error Scrubbing
The RamSan-300 is the first solid state disk to include soft error scrubbing. All solid state disks can correct a single bit error before sending data to the server as a part of their ECC protection. The RamSan-300, however, goes a step further by scrubbing, re-writing the corrected data to memory and verifying the re-write to determine if a memory chip has a failure (a hard error) or if radiation transients caused the single bit error (a soft error). Systems that do not scrub single bit memory errors will either a) report errors to a system log that will eventually encourage replacement of a memory board or b) hide these errors thus leaving a potentially unsafe memory board in the system. Research on this topic suggests that 90 percent of single bit errors are soft errors. In these cases, the RamSan-300 will correct the error through the scrubbing process and prevent unnecessary downtime to replace the memory board.

Shared highlights:

• The World’s Fastest Storage™
• Full array of hardware redundancy to ensure availability.
• IBM Chipkill technology protects against memory errors up to and including loss of an entire memory chip.
• Exclusive Active Backup™ software constantly backs up data without any performance degradation. Other SSDs only begin to backup data once power is already lost.

For each the RamSan-400 and 300, DDRRAM storage is ideal for storing performance-demanding data and accelerating application performance.

Performance
TMS’ customers have seen real-world performance increases from two to 25 times simply by installing a single RamSan. It plugs into servers or fabrics through basic Fibre Channel or InfiniBand connections and appears simply as a very, very fast disk to the network, able to act as any disk or storage system might. Both can accelerate numerous applications across industries. They are best known for drastic performance gains in OLTP, batch processing, and other intensive operations.

Reliability
Each includes hot swappable redundancies wherever physical wear is a factor, such as power supplies and backup hard disks. They also includes three independent internal UPS systems (two for the RamSan-300) to ensure that no power loss or power supply failure will stop the RamSan from performing its internal backup procedures. Redundant cooling fans and redundant failover data ports (optional) are also part of the sophisticated design.

Interoperability
Both the RamSan-400 and RamSan-300 are designed to look like a disk to the network, making them highly interoperable. They can be installed in numerous environments, including Apple OS X, AIX, Solaris, Linux, and Windows. Hardware from Fibre Channel and InfiniBand vendors including Cisco, Emulex, Brocade, McData, Mellanox, QLogic, LSI Logic, and Vixel easily interoperates with RamSan.

Active Backup and Chipkill Technology: The Newest Innovations in SSD
Exclusive to the RamSan brand is Active Backup™ software. Active Backup can continuously backup data on RAM to the internal backup hard disks without impacting performance. This means in an emergency situation, data is anywhere from 60 to 100 percent on the backup hard drives already.

Each also implements IBM Chipkill technology. Standard error correcting code (ECC) implementations correct single-bit data errors in memory chips but cannot correct the multi-bit errors that can result in data integrity issues. Chipkill technology allows a memory system to correct a multi-bit failure up to and including a total chip failure.

Data sheets

• RamSan-400 Overview
• RamSan-300 Overview

White papers

• Faster Oracle Performance with Solid State Disks
• An In-depth look at the RamSan-400 Solid Disk State
• An In-depth look at the RamSan-300 Solid Disk State

Articles & Reviews

• Oracle RAC & Grid Tuning with Solid State Disk, A Review – Part 1 (ITtoolbox Blogs, 11/08/2007)
• Web 2.0 could usher wave of storage disruption (Computerworld, 08/23/2007)
• IC Source Pinpoints Best Deal With RamSan Solid State Disk from Texas Memory Systems (Texas Memory Systems, 2007)
• RamSan Success Stories: CCP Games (Texas Memory Systems, 2006)

Press release

• 400,000 IOPS RamSan Now the Fastest Storage Solution Certified for Sun Microsystems Servers (Texas Memory Systems, 03/28/2007)