1 Optimize Oracle Databases with Violin Sales Guide January 2013 For Internal Use Only Violin Memory. Copyright 2012 Confidential For Internal Use Only

1

Optimize Oracle Databases with Violin

Sales Guide

January 2013

For Internal Use Only

Violin Memory. Copyright 2012 Confidential For Internal Use Only

2

Storage Infrastructure for Oracle Databases The Environment


Workload Characteristics

Online Transactional Processing Why Violin

• Highly Transactional, large number of application users• Queries: high frequency returning small amounts of data• Data Changes: high frequency, usually modifying a single record• Response Times: measured in milliseconds• OLTP systems perform lots of small random I/O• Reads and writes are of a similar ratio

• IOPS and latency are the critical factors• Arrays provide high IOPs to allow more transactions• Arrays provide consistent and predictable low latency which

improves application response times• Random I/O is the sweet spot for flash arrays so they are

perfectly suited to OLTP

Data Warehousing/Decision Support Systems/DW Why Violin

• Reporting Systems: smaller number of power users• Queries: low frequency scanning large amounts of data• Data Changes: windowed, data usually updated in massive batch

jobs• Response Times: measured in minutes or hours• DW systems perform large sequential I/O• Heavily biased towards reads

• Throughput is the critical factor• Arrays provide high throughput through Fibre and Infiniband• Allows large datasets to be processed and aggregated• Removes I/O bottleneck for reporting• Remove network bottleneck for large batch jobs and

therefore reduces the time

Mixed Workloads Why Violin

• Common for mixed-load systems to exist in every infrastructure these days where the database is OLTP but also does some form of reporting

• The transaction rate, amount of data and performance characteristic can vary greatly throughout the day and traditional disk SANs can not keep up this demand.

• Due to moving mechanical parts and seek time latencies, traditional SANs are good at sequential I/O where data is stored next to each other but can not random I/O where blocks are scattered over different spindles.

• The wins for mixed workloads is the objective of both OLTP and Data warehouse

• Gives the customer a more flexible architecture• Enables businesses to run more mixed workloads eliminating

the requirement to need many separate databases

3

Storage Infrastructure for Database Workloads The Opportunity


Customer Challenges Violin’s SolutionPoor IO Performance:• I/O bottlenecks can be a major culprit in slow response times in a database or

application• Excessive waiting can lead to data locking issues leading to further application

performance problems

• Dramatically reduced latency improves query response times, increases transactions per second (TPS) and allows higher levels of productivity

• Consistent I/O performance provided by our arrays protects businesses against spikes in transactional load

• Eliminates “seek time” and I/O operations are executed with ultra-fast response times. CPU resource are no longer wasted and are free for use by applications and users

CPU Performance: I/O wait lowers CPU utilization; creates slow response times; creates other contention areas in a database

Infrastructure Costs: • Overprovisioning of hardware to improve or maintain performance leads to

higher infrastructure and licensing costs• As servers and SANs get bigger/more powerful, they ingest more power, take up

more footprint and release more heat• Short-stroking to achieve low latency leads to over-provisioning

• Violin provides storage at the speed of memory, with >1 million IOPs available at sustained low latency from a single 3U array

• Dramatically reduce environmental costs by deploying less storage

• Realize savings of up to 90% on cooling, power and space• Gain high levels of usable capacity, removing the requirement to

heavily over-provision storage for space and performanceScalability/Growth: • On-demand scalability is harder to achieve unless it’s overprovisioned• As application's grow, legacy hardware performance can suffer and quickly derail

in size and costs• Consolidation can increase requirement for higher IOPs/ throughput• Scaling hardware needs to be simple and non-disruptive

• Storage is easier to scale. When you need more capacity, add an array, present the LUNs and allocate to the database

• Further arrays can be installed and presented live without any disruption to the current system

Consolidation: Consolidated environments concentrate traffic and throughput to less storage arrays which can create bottlenecks. It brings together applications of mixed workloads on to shared hardware which results in:

• More random I/O due to the mixed workload• Denser I/O, increasing number of IOPs• Redundancy being a key factor in consolidation and expensive to implement• Reliability being a key factor in solution design

• More efficient CPUs that can be better utilized and reduction in licensing costs means higher levels of application consolidation with lower costs

• Highest IOPs handle the extra throughput of multiple applications

• Lowest latency for random mixed load I/O nature• Violin 6000 series provides the highest level of hardware

redundancy and reliability required for tier-1applications

4

Optimize Oracle Databases The Solution

The

Sol

ution

Sustain Accelerated Application

Performance

Virtualize for Greater Agility

• Maximise ROI with faster transactions and increased end-user productivity

• Exceed SLAs with low-latency, high throughput• Achieve proactive and predictive competitive

advantage with real-time data access for real-time analytics

• Reduce risk by protecting against load spikes

• Scale/Consolidate without impact: Maximum throughput to support consolidation of mixed workloads/exponential data growth

• Reduce complexity: Consolidation renders consistency (every system looks the same/is managed in the same way); systems become more manageable and service levels increase as a result

• Lower OPEX/CAPEX: Realize up to 90% in power, space, cooling savings versus HDDs

• Faster application deployments: Automatically provision environments/cloning of environments for backups, test or development systems

• Virtualize production: Enable virtualization of production databases with no penalty on I/O performance

• Increased agility: Easily migrate virtual machines to limit the impact of planned maintenance. Implement a self-service model.

• Eliminate performance bottlenecks (IO Blender): Minimize the performance impact of virtualization due to the incredible performance of Violin flash memory, which allows for the density of virtual to physical systems to be maximized.


Consolidate for Reduced TCO

5

Storage Infrastructure for Oracle Databases Qualifying the Opportunity

Target Customer Profile Decision Makers – Key ConcernsEnterprises with large-scale Oracle databases/ performance-hungry applications. Verticals:• Financial services, Education, Government• Healthcare, Insurance, Manufacturing

CIO: Workforce productivity; accelerate business decisions.VP of IT: Reduce SLA times; reduce CAPEX/OPEXApplication/Business Owner: Make applications run faster! Powerful queries, with preference for real-time, faster applications, and features that enable process re-engineering. Centralized storage/virtualization are a big concern for their critical apps.

Key QuestionsCIO/Executive• What percentage of your IT budget is spent on expenses tied to power, cooling and rack space?• Are you looking to reduce your Oracle licensing costs?• Do you have a “green IT” initiative in place for cost savings?• What would accelerated applications mean to your business?

Application Owner• What is the nature of the application? What does it do?• What is the current workload profile of the application?• What problem is the application/s facing? (slow batch process, transactions running slow?)• Does the application problem occur during certain activities or times of the day/week/month?• During the pain point period, how much slower does the application become? • How is the application performance affecting the end users and business?• Are SLAs being met? If not, what is the business impact?

DBA• Where do you see the current database pain point?• Do you have regular times/activities that increase the database load?• What is the database server utilization? (CPU usage)• What does the current database infrastructure look like?• What is your backup and restore policy?• Do you use host based replication? If so, what is the configuration?• What is the current size of the database? What is the growth expected over the next 3 years?• How do you present the storage to the database? (file system, ASM?)• Are you looking to consolidate or virtualize?


6

Optimize Oracle Databases with Violin Elevator Pitch

Elevator PitchWhether your Oracle databases support data warehousing workloads, online transaction processing (OLTP), or analytics, Violin flash Memory Arrays deliver unbeatable performance that scales to hundreds of TBs of data, enabling you to virtualize and consolidate multiple databases completely in flash memory and providing real-time access to the data that drives your top line.

How we do it: What this means to you:Violin flash Memory Arrays deliver:• Sustained read/write performance for any type of I/O

workload• Spike-free storage I/O latency at any scale• Up to 1 million IOPs • Tier 1 Reliability, Serviceability, Availability

• 90% improvement in critical report generation timeframes• 10x data processing on the same compute resources• 6x faster response times than dedicated application systems like Oracle

Exadata, at 1/3 the cost• Highly reliable storage at 50% the cost of competitors’ flash offering• 50-80% lower costs for power, cooling and space

Decision Makers Key Value MessagesChief Information Officer • Improve workforce productivity and accelerate the ROI of your databases by as much as 30%

• Increase data center agility by doing more with your applications and reacting faster to business requirements

• Take advantage of new business opportunities as soon as they become apparent• Control the bottom line; Increase top line

VP of Information Technology - Reduce operational costs (power, cooling, data centre footprint) by up to 90%- Allows for a reduction in CPU-based software licenses (e.g. Oracle Database)- Exceed SLAs

Application/Business Owner • Faster applications/queries/reports with Violin’s high-throughput/low-latency flash arrays• Eliminates I/O contention and I/O wait times • Accelerates applications by reading and writing data blocks within microseconds.


7

Optimize Oracle Databases Handling Objections

Company Cost1. I can’t risk deploying mission-critical applications on storage

from a startup. What’s your value-add?We are mature company with hundreds of customers and over a thousand systems deployed for business critical applications. We have Toshiba as a major investor and supplier with on-going R&D agreements. Violin offers customers a choice with an open-platform, open architecture, that supports major vendors and OS’s.

4. Violin is too expensive.It comes down to reducing your total cost of ownership and cost per transaction. How much If your batches and reports ran faster, how much faster access do you get from faster storage, and how does that translate in terms of your bottom line?

Technology / Product / Feature2. [Competitor] tells me clones, de-duplication & compression

are key features required to reduce storage footprint. Violin doesn’t have any.These features will be available on Violin storage arrays in Q2 of 2013.

3. [Competitor] tells me that Violin arrays have a single point of failure.All active components of the Violin array, from the memory gateways, power supplies, array controllers all the way down to the flash memory modules have built-in, hardware controlled, redundancy and are hot swappable.


8

Optimize Oracle Databases Frequently Asked Questions

1. What portion of my database should I place on Violin?All of it. If you want to eliminate IO bottlenecks in your database,

use Violin.

2. Is your storage certified by Oracle?No. Oracle does not certify any hardware vendor platform with the exception of their own hardware. Oracle is hardware agnostic.

3. Do you support HCC (Hybrid Columnar Compression)?No. HCC is only currently supported by Exadata and Pillar.

4. How does Violin compare with Exadata?In most cases, Violin competes and beats Exadata performance without the need for application modification. The big asterisk is the type of configuration, the type of servers.

5. Do I need to change my Oracle configuration or version to run with Violin?No. Violin is version agnostic. However, if you are using Exadata, you need to upgrade to Oracle 11, requiring conversion of your database.

6. What storage format do you support with Oracle?Violin support file system, ASM, raw devices as well as OCFS2. Note that Oracle Exadata requires the use of ASM, requiring conversion of your database.

7. What operating systems can you run Oracle on with Violin?Any supported by Oracle. Note that Exadata only supports Linux and Solaris.


9

Optimize Oracle Databases Competition

Competitive LandscapeBoth incumbents and upstarts are focusing on providing flash-based solutions. Three types of solutions are common – Hybrid (HDD+SSD), All-SSD, and All-Flash. A quick summary of each solution is below:

Hybrid (HDD + SSD): HDD-based storage software stack retrofitted for SSD. Data split between slow and fast media Performance: Low – very sensitive to workloadPlayers: NetApp, EMC, Tintri

All-SSD: Storage software stack designed to use SSDs; Performance: MediumPlayers: PureStorage, Nimbus

All-Flash: Technology optimized for flash; Performance: MaximumPlayers: Violin

EMC ResponseEMC positions VFCache as a caching tier that complements its portfolio of flash storage solutions. They do not position VFCache as an alternative to their array-based flash caching solution. EMC’s message is to combine VFCache with array-based SSD cache to achieve the best performance acceleration. VFCache is targeted at reducing latencies for business applications and virtualized environments.

• VFCache is not effective for all IO intensive applications, it depends on the read percentage and the locality of data reference.

• With only 300G flash per physical server, in multi-tenant environments such as virtualization, the effectiveness of the cache is highly diminished since the cache is shared among all the applications.

• Server-based flash doesn’t deliver high availability. VFCache relies on the application or array to deliver high availability.

NetApp ResponseNetApp is primarily focused on non-IOPS intensive environments and File services environments. However when they run into IOPS limitations they position their Flash Cache Cards (PAM) as the simplest solution to performance problem. The also have a concept of ‘Hybrid Aggregates’ which allows them to incorporate their SSD based shelves as part of their virtual pool of storage to allow a performance persistent tier shared with a SAS or SATA storage. Mixing this with their FlexShare software (part of Data ONTAP) they can provide some level of ‘auto tiering.’

• NetApp is a traditional disk-array vendor and tries to solve• performance challenges with disk-based approach• Tier 1 applications cannot afford compromise as it impacts business• Unified storage is a great story but NetApp has only 15% of their entire

deployments that are both SAN and NAS in a single system. For the most part, the deployments are either Files or Block.

• Disk-based performance scaling takes away the $/GB value disk may provide over FLASH

FusionIO: Weakness: data on PCIe card is not shareable, a big requirement in database environments

Texas Memory Systems: Weakness: Lack of high availability as reflected in several customer outages.


Documents

1 Optimize Oracle Databases with Violin Sales Guide January 2013 For Internal Use Only Violin Memory. Copyright 2012 Confidential For Internal Use Only