Design and Architecture of Dell Acceleration Appliances for Database (DAAD): A Practical Approach with High Availability Guaranteed

Abstract

As IT organizations are pursuing database High Availability (HA) solutions to ensure and protest critical commercial data, the challenge is to leverage the three-fold key dimensions: cost, performance and availability. A successful solution needs to integrate Database Management System (DBMS) seamlessly with back-end storage and offer good performance and customer data protection. Through extensively investigating plenty of productions in the market, Oracle database is a leading solution for business critical application. As a cost effective solution, it could reduce business risk and achieve data availability, performance, and Return on Investment (ROI). On the other aspect, high-end storage solution, Storage Area Network (SAN) based on Fibre Channel protocol can be easy to deploy with Oracle database and match end-user's requirements. In this paper, we will present a design of high available database on a new reference architecture. The implementation of design is based on Oracle database with Dell Acceleration Appliances for Databases (DAAD), which introduces flash technology by Fusion-IO. To demonstrate practical performances, we built a proof-ofconcept platform and compared the platform with a traditional 96-SAS-drive platform. The results show that our approach can deliver more than 1-million random Input/output Operations per Second (IOPS) that is 27 times faster than the traditional platform and it can also achieve a 96% reduction in the latencies, thus showing the scalability of the approach with massive database nodes. Therefore, our approach provides not only an ultra-fast storage solution to boost database performances but it also offers a flexible and high available design to achieve zero-downtime database.