Oracle 10g and 11g Real Application Clusters (RAC)

Accelerate Data Warehousing and OLTP Applications

Oracle 10g and 11g Real Application Clusters (RAC) deliver a highly scalable, highly available application environment built using clusters of servers. Using Oracle RAC, an enterprise can deploy business applications with improved scalability and at lower costs than single instance database environments. But maximizing Oracle RAC performance requires a high performance cluster interconnect.

By leveraging Voltaire’s InfiniBand-based I/O fabric, Oracle RAC can dramatically accelerate applications. Benchmarks show substantially improved transaction rates and shortened query times for both data warehouse and OLTP applications.

Oracle’s support of IP over Voltaire InfiniBand (IPoIB) delivers high performance interconnects for Oracle 10g RAC along with the enterprise-class capabilities that are required by Oracle’s most demanding RAC customers.

In addition to the bandwidth and latency advantages of InfiniBand, Oracle 10g and 11g customers benefit from the reliable delivery capabilities inherent in InfiniBand that offload end-to-end error checking to the InfiniBand fabric, and freeing CPU cycles for application processing. The end result is an increase of 25% to 50% in performance and high availability through full infrastructure redundancy.

The Secret Sauce for Accelerating Oracle 11g RAC – InfiniBand with Reliable Datagram Sockets

The same Voltaire InfiniBand-based I/O fabric used by Oracle 10g customers can also be leveraged for customers looking migrate to Oracle 11g. Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS) over InfiniBand provides a horizontally scalable, high-performance alternative to traditional vertical scaling for enterprises using Oracle 11g and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC).

Voltaire solutions use Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS) to provide a high bandwidth, low latency, ultra reliable inter-process communication (IPC) protocol that dramatically improves the performance of cluster interconnect intensive applications.

RDS is a socket offload mechanism developed  by Oracle for IPC communications. RDS is part of the InfiniBand Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED), and allows the processing of IPC traffic to be offloaded to the I/O hardware. Oracle 11g RAC users can benefit from a significant performance boost by using RDS over InfiniBand.

Oracle Exadata and HP Oracle Database Machine utilize an advanced version of RDS that supports Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), providing even better performance.

Currently, Oracle has found RDS to reduce communication latency and CPU utilization by up to 50%. The result is drastically improved application performance and improved scalability.

High Availability and Scalability

Leveraging InfiniBand’s built-in high availability and load balancing features, RDS has been rigorously tested by Oracle to meet the most demanding enterprise requirements. With Voltaire’s products having achieved Oracle RAC and Oracle Enterprise Linux certifications, applications running in Oracle 10g and 11g RAC environments can achieve extreme levels of database performance and scalability while using fully certified solutions.
 

We are very pleased with the performance and scalability that Voltaire InfiniBand brings to Oracle Real Application Clusters in our large Oracle Database environment. To deliver the best and most reliable service to our customers, our applications demand fast access to data and this solution truly delivers. An important capability this solution provides is the ability to eliminate latency and scale our Oracle Database applications.
- Jens-Christian Pokolm, Analyst IT Services, Postbank