Sun Servers to offer SSD

Oracle Database Tips by Donald BurlesonJune 6, 2015

Physical disk I/O is measured in milliseconds, an eternity when compared to the faster operations within other server components such as network RAM and CPU speeds. For many years, Oracle shops have been embracing solid-state disks (SSD), RAM disks that operate hundreds of time faster than the old-fashioned platter technology from the 1960's. SSD also has not channel contention, and as prices fall, SSD will eventually displace the ancient magnetic spinning platters of the past century.

Now we see that Sun Solaris is offering 32 gigabytes in internal SSD technology in almost all of the new Sun servers and that SSD is especially useful for database application where I/O can be a major bottleneck. Sun notes that their internal SSD consumes one-fifth the power and is a hundred times faster than the magnetic-coated spinning platter disk. They note that SSD is perfect for I/O intensive systems like Oracle applications:

"Like EMC, Sun is predicting big things for flash.

While flash storage is far more expensive than disk on a per-gigabyte basis, Sun argues that flash is cheaper for high-performance applications that rely on fast IOPS (I/O Operations Per Second) speeds."

Sun also notes that all the major hardware vendors are predicting big things for SSD, and predicts that flash SSD disks will be adopted quickly for anyone developing systems using database products like Oracle:

"The majority of enterprises building I/O-intensive applications will use some amount of flash within a year, Fowler predicted. Databases like Oracle, MySQL and IBM DB2 are ideal candidates, he says."

Choosing the right SSD for Oracle

Burleson Consulting has been deploying SSD for several years, and some I/O intensive Oracle systems can see up to 600x faster performance. SSD is also very popular with Oracle RAC databases because it reduces cache fusion overhead because you can define very small data buffer caches on each node.

Burleson Consulting has been deploying SSD on Oracle database since 2005 and we have experienced SSD experts to help any Oracle shop evaluate whether SSD is right for your application. BC experts can also help you choose the SSD that is best for your database. Just call 800-766-1884 or e-mail for SSD support details.

Market Survey of SSD vendors for Oracle:

There are many vendors who offer rack-mount solid-state disk that work with Oracle databases, and the competitive market ensures that product offerings will continuously improve while prices fall. SearchStorage notes that SSD is will soon replace platter disks and that hundreds of SSD vendors may enter the market:

"The number of vendors in this category could rise to several hundred in the next 3 years as enterprise users become more familiar with the benefits of this type of storage."

As of January 2015, many of the major hardware vendors (including Sun and EMC) are replacing slow disks with RAM-based disks, and Sun announced that all of their large servers will offer SSD.

Here are the major SSD vendors for Oracle databases (vendors are listed alphabetically):

2008 rack mount SSD Performance Statistics

SearchStorage has done a comprehensive survey of rack mount SSD vendors, and lists these SSD rack mount vendors, with this showing the fastest rack-mount SSD devices:

manufacturer	model	technology	interface	performance metrics and notes
IBM	RamSan-400	RAM SSD	Fibre Channel InfiniBand	3,000MB/s random sustained external throughput, 400,000 random IOPS
Violin Memory	Violin 1010	RAM SSD	PCIe	1,400MB/s read, 1,00MB/s write with ×4 PCIe, 3 microseconds latency
Solid Access Technologies	USSD 200FC	RAM SSD	Fibre Channel SAS SCSI	391MB/s random sustained read or write per port (full duplex is 719MB/s), with 8 x 4Gbps FC ports aggregated throughput is approx 2,000MB/s, 320,000 IOPS
Curtis	HyperXCLR R1000	RAM SSD	Fibre Channel	197MB/s sustained R/W transfer rate, 35,000 IOPS

Choosing the right SSD for Oracle

When evaluating SSD for Oracle databases you need to consider performance (throughput and response time), reliability (Mean Time Between failures) and TCO (total cost of ownership). Most SSD vendors will provide a test RAM disk array for benchmark testing so that you can choose the vendor who offers the best price/performance ratio.

Burleson Consulting does not partner with any SSD vendors and we provide independent advice in this constantly-changing market. BC was one of the earliest adopters of SSD for Oracle and we have been deploying SSD on Oracle database since 2005 and we have experienced SSD experts to help any Oracle shop evaluate whether SSD is right for your application. BC experts can also help you choose the SSD that is best for your database. Just call 800-766-1884 or e-mail.: for SSD support details.

DRAM SSD vs. Flash SSD

With all the talk about the Oracle “flash cache”, it is important to note that there are two types of SSD, and only DRAM SSD is suitable for Oracle database storage. The flash type SSD suffers from serious shortcomings, namely a degradation of access speed over time. At first, Flash SSD is 5 times faster than a platter disk, but after some usage the average read time becomes far slower than a hard drive. For Oracle, only rack-mounted DRAM SSD is acceptable for good performance:

	Avg. Read speed	Avg. write speed
Platter disk	10.0 ms.	7.0 ms.
DRAM SSD	0.4 ms.	0.4 ms.
Flash SSD	1.7 ms.	94.5 ms.

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