Cisco Cisco UCS 6120XP 20-Port Fabric Interconnect White Paper
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Data Warehouse Scalability with Cisco Unified Computing System
and Oracle Real Application Cluster with EMC CLARiiON
and Oracle Real Application Cluster with EMC CLARiiON
®
Storage
What You Will Learn
Designing and scaling an Oracle data warehouse can now be accomplished efficiently, quickly, and in close
alignment with evolving business needs through the features of the Cisco Unified Computing System™. These
features include the capability to provision servers rapidly with Cisco Unified Computing System service profiles and
to meet increasing resource demands with faster processors and a low-latency unified fabric. This document
describes a data warehouse scalability study using Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC), Cisco Unified Computing
System, and EMC CLARiiON storage. Data warehouse solutions today face constant challenges related to
performance and scalability while they strive to remain cost effective. This study demonstrates the near-linear
scalability of the Cisco Unified Computing System as additional server and storage resources are added to an
existing cluster. This highly cost-effective and scalable solution is based on:
●
The ability to add computing resources incrementally, quickly, and as needed with the Cisco Unified
Computing System; using a unified fabric, wire-once model, an additional blade server could be provisioned
within minutes using service profiles that are managed by Cisco
®
UCS Manager
●
The modular design of EMC CLARiiON storage, with capacity that scales easily while maintaining I/O service
levels for demanding data warehouse workloads
This configuration enables users to scale compute and storage resources horizontally and vertically.
Challenge: Expensive Data Warehouse Scalability and Time-Consuming Server Provisioning
The data warehouse is evolving in many of today’s business environments from a passisve reporting database
servicing a few users to a mission-critical, real-time repository that must support many users entering random and
complex queries that run for hours. Here are the hurdles that are frequently encountered in today’s data warehouse
deployments:
●
Multiple users run random and complex queries in parallel
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Continuous data growth is unavoidable.
●
High availability is mandatory for mission-critical applications.
●
Growth is difficult to anticipate, with data warehouses frequently growing unexpectedly as a result of their own
deployment success.
●
Hardware components need to be fully utilized to meet business objectives.
●
Achieving a balance between interdependent components is crucial to scaling.
These challenges can be grouped into three categories:
●
Hardware overprovisioning: To help ensure that data warehouses can accommodate required resource
demands now and in the future, organizations commonly deploy more infrastructure than needed, to handle
the ever-increasing volumes of data, storage, and transactions. The result is often an oversized hardware
configuration and significantly higher costs.
●
Scalability: The capability to easily, efficiently, quickly, and cost-effectively scale a data warehouse is crucial
for businesses that depend on database applications. Typically, scalability is achieved by adding units of
computing power and achieving a commensurate improvement in capacity by adding disks. With traditional