Oracle Grid Computing: Changing the Way IT Operates

Oracle Database

By Logan McLeod Grid computing has evolved rapidly from an appealing Nathan Saunders concept to an effective and critical real-world tool. Today, Thomas Kopec IT departments are using Oracle® grid architectures and Jaime Delgado Dell™ hardware to tackle some of the data center’s most pressing problems, and keep IT closely aligned with dynamic business needs.

oday’s IT departments must constantly adapt the two companies enable organizations to use to rapid change while still maintaining high sophisticated software and standard, cost-effective Tquality of service and responsiveness. And Dell servers and storage to create comprehensive they must do so cost-effectively, even as workloads grid infrastructures and efficient data centers. (For grow. Such challenges have put a tremendous strain more on the Dell and Oracle relationship, see the “A on traditional data center architectures—and turned common view of the grid” sidebar in this article.) the attention of many IT departments to grid With these infrastructures, many IT groups are computing. changing the way they operate, and finding effective With grid computing, groups of hardware and methods for keeping costs down, delivering high software components are virtualized and pooled into levels of performance, and staying aligned with the a single set of shared services that can be rapidly needs of the enterprise. provisioned and redistributed to help meet changing needs. The idea is to deliver flexible systems that Key Oracle grid solutions are more resilient and less expensive than traditional Grid computing can involve a variety of technologies. legacy systems, which typically use dedicated serv- To help organizations create infrastructures that can ers to support database operations. meet their specific needs, Oracle offers a comprehen- Efficiency and resilience are critical qualities for sive, integrated portfolio of grid computing solutions enterprise IT environments, and shared resources are reaching from the Web tier all the way down to mid- therefore attractive to many of today’s hard-pressed dleware, databases, servers, and storage. Key solutions IT departments. As a result, grid computing has quickly include the following: gone from being an emerging architecture to a real- world approach employed by a large number of orga- ■■ Oracle Database 11g: Oracle Database 11g delivers nizations. Oracle has been a pioneer in grid computing, high levels of scalability and the ability to manage having introduced its grid computing technologies in and maintain virtually all types of data online in a 2003, and there are now more than 15,000 organiza- grid environment. The Automatic Storage tions using Oracle grid technologies. Management feature creates a single pool of Oracle grid technologies and practices are an shared storage that can be provisioned on demand especially good fit with Dell technologies. Together, and automatically managed to help optimize

44 DELL POWER SOLUTIONS | 2010 Issue 1 Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2010 Issue 1. Copyright © 2010 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. space utilization and avoid I/O bottle- necks. Workload management helps A common view of the grid ensure that applications receive the In this interview, Dell CIO Robin Johnson and Oracle senior vice president of product development processing resources needed to meet Angelo Pruscino discuss the Dell and Oracle relationship and how it has helped each company develop defined service levels. Streams and its approach to grid computing. For an extended podcast discussion between Johnson and Pruscino, transportable tablespaces enable orga- visit www.oracle.com/goto/racpodcast. nizations to provision data as a resource on an enterprise-wide basis. What does the combination of Dell and Oracle bring ■■ Oracle Real Application Clusters to grid infrastructures? (Oracle RAC): Oracle RAC enables a “Both our companies emphasize simplified, cost-effective infrastructures, and that emphasis single database to run across a cluster comes together in grid computing,” says Johnson. “You can keep complexity and cost down by of servers, helping avoid single points utilizing standards-based Dell servers and storage, while the Oracle grid architecture provides an of failure and enabling administrators easy-to-manage, flexible, available, and scalable grid environment on top of that. Our technolo- to scale the deployment incrementally by adding nodes as workloads increase. gies go hand in hand.” Thus, Oracle RAC helps provide high Pruscino explains further: “One indication of that is the range of validated and tested configu- levels of fault tolerance, performance, rations of Oracle and Dell technologies—including servers and storage—across the application, and scalability without requiring appli- middleware, and database tiers. In general, these things are the result of a long relationship between cation changes. Oracle and Dell.” ■■ Oracle Enterprise Manager: Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a single What does that relationship involve, and how has it integrated interface for the top-down affected the evolution of grid computing? administration and monitoring of appli- “This is a multifaceted relationship,” Johnson notes. “We have a very strong sales and marketing cations and systems in an Oracle grid. relationship, and Dell is a leading reseller of Oracle products across the entire product stack. But there It continuously monitors resource allo- is also a strong technology-focused relationship, and we work together on that front all the time.” cation and utilization, and automatically provides alerts and takes “Oracle software is stress-tested and benchmarked on Dell hardware, and Dell often provides corrective action whenever defined input for product modifications,” says Pruscino. “In addition, we have also worked together on a service levels are at risk because of number of targeted initiatives. One of these was Project MegaGrid, where our two companies and capacity overload or failure. Enterprise Intel partnered to develop a single validated set of deployment practices for grid computing. And Manager supports the broad Oracle there are others, such as Oracle Enterprise Management, where we joined forces to build a reference ecosystem in a grid environment configuration that integrates Oracle Enterprise Manager with Dell OpenManage™ software, creating through a variety of connector and a powerful tool for managing an Oracle grid on Dell PowerEdge servers.” adapter plug-ins to third-party technologies and software. Does the fact that Dell and Oracle are each other’s ■■ Oracle VM: Oracle VM is server virtu- customers have an impact on your approach to grid alization software that helps maximize computing? the consolidation and agility of x86- “Certainly,” says Johnson. “Dell made a corporate decision to move over to a grid-type architecture, and x86-64-based systems in data and Oracle has been a big part of that. We use Oracle Database, Oracle RAC and Oracle Applications, center production environments. Administrators can manage resources and Oracle Middleware. We are often involved in a lot of the early adopter and beta programs, which centrally through an easy-to-use Web is a benefit to us. And Oracle gets Dell IT, this 5,000-plus-person enterprise, to help drive early adoption browser–based tool that enables them and improvements of the product.” to create, clone, share, configure, boot, Pruscino adds Oracle’s perspective: “Oracle is a significant Dell user. We have 20,000 servers and migrate virtual machines. Oracle internally. We use Dell hardware for our hosting systems and our development systems, as well as VM supports both Oracle and non- other areas. That gives us a real working knowledge of how Oracle software and Dell hardware fit Oracle applications. best together.” ■■ Oracle Fusion Middleware: Oracle “The mutual customer relationships help us both run our businesses,” Johnson concludes. “But it Fusion Middleware comprises a range of application grid products—such as also means that our joint customers benefit from knowing that the solution stack we offer has already WebLogic Server, Coherence, JRockit, gone through the test of running in a world-class, Fortune® 50 organization.”

and Tuxedo—that form the foundation Linux with premier backports, compre- to handle the needs of multiple large for grid computing in the middle tier. hensive management, indemnification, campuses—which is especially important With advanced clustering technology, testing, and more. for SUNY, which operates across 64 loca- these products support extremely high tions. The grid configuration was able to levels of availability, performance, and Oracle and Dell grid provide sub-second response times for a scalability. The ability to dynamically technologies at work user load representing about 11,000 stu- adjust cluster sizes of live running As grid computing finds its way into an dents simultaneously registering for applications coupled with versatile increasing number of data centers, it is classes and performing other typical tasks. automation helps provide efficient proving to be an effective tool in the effort In one test, nearly 70,000 courses were resource utilization and simplified to increase agility, simplify infrastructures, selected in an hour, which was about 37 management. and, especially, consolidate IT resources. times the actual number seen at a SUNY ■■ Oracle Enterprise Linux® OS: Oracle This was certainly the case at the State school of 11,000 students.1 Enterprise Linux is available as open University of New York (SUNY), where the One of the most extensive uses of source and is designed for compre- university, Dell, and Oracle worked Oracle and Dell grid technologies can be hensive compatibility—both source together on a university-wide proof-of- found at Dell itself. The Dell IT group was and binary—with Red Hat® Enterprise concept project focusing on grid comput- using the traditional approach of having Linux. Oracle Enterprise Linux is certi- ing. The team consolidated 10 of the dedicated servers running individual fied for compliance with the Linux university’s high-volume application sys- databases in its data centers. But as the Standard Base (LSB) standard, which tems into a single grid made up of Dell business and data volumes grew, this helps to reduce the differences PowerEdge™ servers, Dell/EMC storage, approach became problematic, leading between individual Linux distributions and Oracle RAC software (see Figure 1, to server sprawl. and the costs involved in porting which shows the Oracle RAC cluster con- This traditional approach also made applications to different distributions, figuration used in this environment). The it difficult to keep up with demand. Each in addition to helping lower the cost project showed that this grid infrastruc- year, Dell IT typically handles about 600 and effort involved in supporting those ture was effective in handling the multiple projects that involve building database applications. The Oracle Unbreakable enterprise resource planning (ERP) appli- infrastructure. Each of those projects in Linux support program delivers cost- cations and Oracle RAC databases, and turn typically requires disaster recovery effective, enterprise-class support for that it could be dynamically scaled out systems and other environments, leaving each project with hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes of storage attached. Delivering database infrastructure could potentially require two to three months, LAN/WAN significantly reducing the value to the Dell business. Eight-node Oracle RAC cluster Matching computing power to actual of Dell PowerEdge servers demand was also a challenge. For each database environment, Dell IT was essen-

Private network Private network tially required to forecast the necessary switch switch capacity. When the team would come back to these environments later, however, they often found that they had not Fibre Channel Fibre Channel switch switch been fully used: around 90 percent had been significantly overprovisioned and underutilized.

Dell/EMC CX3-40 SAN Too often, however, this fact became clear only months after the system was put in place. By then, from a provisioning Figure 1. Oracle RAC cluster configuration in the SUNY proof-of-concept environment and server logistics perspective, the Dell

1 For more information on this testing and the proof-of-concept architecture, see “Scaling SunGard Higher Education Banner Software on Dell Hardware,” by Dave Jaffe, Ph.D.; Kai Yu; and Dan Brint, in Dell Power Solutions, August 2008, DELL.COM/Downloads/Global/Power/ps3q08-20080283-SUNY.pdf.

46 DELL POWER SOLUTIONS | 2010 Issue 1 Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2010 Issue 1. Copyright © 2010 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Logan McLeod is a senior enterprise architect for Dell IT, where he is responsible for “Oracle grid technologies and practices global database technology strategy and are an especially good fit with Dell architecture supporting Dell IT internal operations. Logan has more than 15 years of IT technologies.” experience, is an active member of key industry advisory boards, and was most recently recognized as Oracle Magazine’s team was left with underutilized storage advantages have been similar for the Grid Control Architect of the Year for 2006. area network (SAN) arrays in the middle storage as well. For the first grid, Dell IT of the data center that were difficult to used the traditional storage forecasts and Nathan Saunders is a member of the Dell reach, because the poles for the Fibre approved approximately 85 TB of stor- Solutions Alliance and Marketing team. In Channel cables were now too far from age. After nine months, that environment his career he has co-marketed with Microsoft, where servers were being added—making still had not consumed more than the ini- Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, and SAP managing it difficult to reclaim those resources and tial 10 TB that was deployed—avoiding OEM products coordination, product and leaving the storage effectively orphaned the need for about 75 TB of storage just partner marketing, and services. Nathan has in the middle of the data center. for that one case. a B.S. from Norfolk State University and an To help address the problem, Dell IT Dell IT currently has seven 16-node M.B.A. from New Mexico State University, implemented a grid-based architecture grids in place, each handling 150 data- and has received a Systems Engineer that enabled the group to pool and share bases, and it continues to expand its grid Certificate from Electronic Data Systems. computing resources. The group then architecture. The team has found that this began pre-building computing capacity approach makes highly efficient use of Thomas Kopec is a senior technical account before requests for database infrastruc- the available resources. At Dell, consoli- manager with Oracle. As a member of the ture actually came in. This capacity, which dated virtual environments are now the Oracle/Dell Alliance team, he focuses on took the form of 16-node Oracle RAC default for database infrastructure in the technical aspects of the resale relation- clusters of Dell PowerEdge servers with non-production environments. ship, including presales activities, training, 10 TB of Dell/EMC SAN storage, enabled and running point between the Dell and the group to move from a forecasting Efficient, cost-effective Oracle engineering teams. For the last model to an on-demand model. Now, Dell architecture 12 years he has supported Oracle’s technol- IT can provision a massive amount of As the experiences of SUNY and Dell ogy offerings in the channel. capacity up front, monitor consumption, show, Oracle technologies give IT and quickly reallocate or add resources groups the tools to build grid architec- Jaime Delgado is a senior director of as needed. tures on cost-effective Dell hardware business development at Oracle, where One result of this approach has been platforms to help achieve a range of ben- he is responsible for the Dell Americas a reduction in provisioning time from 30 efits. An effective grid architecture can partnership. business days to just 5, with typical deliv- enable successful consolidation and a ery in about 2. The grid architecture has highly efficient data center, which in turn also increased efficiency, helping ensure can help reduce costs as well as energy that computing resources are well utilized, use in support of environmentally con- while simultaneously increasing flexibility scious computing. It can help increase and enhancing the team’s ability to rapidly operational agility, with on-demand pro- respond to changing business demands. visioning and proactive monitoring of The grid model has also led to signifi- grids. It can support predictable perfor- QUICK LINKs cant savings: each 16-node grid enables mance and scalability with clustering and Dell IT to avoid the installation of 134 virtualization employed throughout the Oracle and Dell: physical servers that would have been technology stack. And it can enable DELL.COM/Oracle required in the legacy model. Further increased availability and quality of ser- www.oracle.com/dell operational savings have come from the vice. In short, today’s grid architectures Oracle grid computing: reduced database administrator and sys- have the potential to deliver real results www.oracle.com/grid tems engineering time associated with in the data center, and to the enterprise the reduced number of servers. The as a whole.