Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage

In my recent blog entry entitled Words About Oracle Direct NFS On Sun Storage 7410 And Chip Multithreading Technology (CMT) For Oracle Database 11g Release 2 I discussed how my old friend Glenn Fawcett and I are studying OLTP performance characteristics of dual-socket Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) versus the Sun T5240 (also dual-socket). After I set Glenn up with a nice flexible OLTP workload, Glenn started collecting results and analyzing Oracle Direct NFS (DNFS) performance. Now that he has finished testing with DNFS over 10GbE, he posted a fresh blog entry on the matter that can be found at the following link:

• Direct NFS vs Kernel NFS bake-off with Oracle 11g and Solaris… and the winner is

The previous installments on that thread can be found here:

• Monitoring Direct NFS with Oracle 11g and Solaris… pealing back the layers of the onion.
• Direct NFS access to Sun Storage 7410 with Oracle 11g and Solaris… configuration and verification

Glenn measured some 90,000 random 8KB physical IOPS over 10GbE and over 1GB/s when scanning disk!

As I’ve been saying for quite some time, “NFS, it ain’t just for kids no more!”

Now, just in case anyone thinks we are wasting our time with some sort of “trick” workload, take my word for it—this workload is grueling. Although I haven’t seen the AWR report from the 90,000+ IOPS 10GbE run, I know enough about the T5240 and this workload to guesstimate that the logical I/O rate for SGA buffer hits would have been on the order of 250,000/second and the CPUs were likely about 60% utilized. I know Glenn reads my blog and he’ll see the trackback from this post so lets see if he can chime in here and correct me on that LIO, CPU guesstimate…Glenn?