New DNFS Performance Results

In conjunction with my good friend and colleague, Dave Wild with EMC NAS Solutions Engineering, the group I manage has recently completed some testing around DNFS performance. In my previous post on this subject, I was not particularly excited about DNFS. I am now happy to say that I can retract that negative view. We found DNFS to perform very well indeed, when compared to conventional kernel NFS. As a result, the EMC Oracle Commercial Solutions Validation program is now in the process of completely converting our testing effort to Oracle 11g as a result.

The following contains a summary of our results, first starting with basic throughput:

As usual with our program, this is an actual database workload result using an industry standard OLTP benchmark. Note the dramatic improvement in throughput using DNFS compared to a kernel bonded NIC with kernel NFS. This implies the problem with our previous results: We were not using enough ports. And this points out one of the big benefits of DNFS: It does a far better job of utilizing multiple NICs than normal Linux does. Here is the comparison in terms of port scaling using DNFS:

As you can see, the scaling on increased ports is pretty outstanding.

Another big benefit of using DNFS was improvement of CPU utilization on both the database server and the NAS file server. The benefit on the file server was particularly impressive as the following chart shows:

We worked closely with Oracle DNFS group in developing this impressive performance. As a result, we can now enthusiastically endorse DNFS for NAS performance.

Comments

[Marty]

Thanks for taking the time to post your more recent test results.

Are there any more details available, such as the parameters used, changes from default values, etc?

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Response:

These will be released in more detail on May 28 in conjunction with our Q2 launch. Please watch the Oracle CSV launch page which is here:

http://powerlink.emc.com/km/appmanager/km/secureDesktop?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=default&internalId=0b01406680217d7d&_irrt=true

Note: A Powerlink account is required for this link. If you do not have that, a subset of the documents will be published on EMC.com here:

http://www.emc.com/solutions/midsize/midsize-solutions-for-oracle.htm

Regards,
TOSG