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

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.