QLogic 10000 Series Accelerating Database Infrastructure Using Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g R2 and QLogic FabricCache© Adapters - Manual (Page 4)

Accelerating Database Infrastructure
Using Oracle Real Application Clusters 11gR2 and QLogic FabricCache
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that not only will all servers caching hot data see higher I/O throughput, but those reads will have
been offloaded from the SAN and the storage array, so they will have more resources to devote to
processing write operations.
Oracle and QLogic Technologies for Accelerating Database
Infrastructure
Why Use FabricCache Adapters for RAC Environments?
Database Management Systems such as Oracle Real Application Clusters are demanding applications.
Flash-based solutions for Solid State Disk and caching are becoming top considerations for addressing
the challenges posed by such I/O-intensive applications. When evaluating which flash-based solution
to standardize on, IT managers face several important considerations:
 Many caching solutions in the marketplace represent proprietary storage platforms, which may be
costly and/or incompatible with storage strategy already chosen for the enterprise.
 Current server-based SSD solutions typically only support single server instances and specifically do
not support multiple-server implementations such as clustered environments, including Oracle RAC.
FabricCache™ QLE10000 adapters bring shared, server-based caching to the SAN. They are
purposely designed to address the high I/O demands and distributed nature of clustered applications
and virtualized environments.
 Most SSD solutions are not entirely transparent to the application. To be effectively utilized for
Oracle RAC, they may require (at the very least) implementation of a cumbersome Information
Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategy, often requiring restructuring of database storage and
redeployment of the database. There is also an ongoing administrative cost component to managing
the ILM strategy itself.
 Solutions that deploy SSDs as server-based cache have been shown to outperform solutions that
deploy SSDs with filter drivers in the storage system for applications such as Oracle RAC.
With its adapter-based caching technology QLogic’s FabricCache adapters offer an alternative that, for
Oracle RAC implementations, streamlines both the cost and complexity of realizing the performance
benefits of flash-based storage technology. The benefits of using FabricCache adapters for Oracle
RAC environments are:
 Transparency. By deploying flash as a coherent caching mechanism at the HBA level, FabricCache
adapters can ensure that management, access and use of flash-based caching can be made
*completely* transparent to Oracle RAC, as well as the operating system and hypervisor. With
FabricCache adapters, there is no need to restructure or redeploy your Oracle RAC databases.
FabricCache HBAs can be installed on servers where RAC instances are already deployed, and your
Oracle RAC database can begin using FabricCache caching (with no configuration changes) as soon
as the cluster is brought back up. FabricCache is also transparent to the SAN, so the SAN’s
configuration and data protection model are preserved intact.