Market-leading Dutch Oracle hosting company adds 320GB of Fusion Powered Oracle Smart Flash Cache to its platform to eliminate performance problems and support future growth.

Solution Focus:

• Oracle
• Caching
• Software as a Service (SaaS)

 

The Challenge

MCX Administration Services provides custom, hosted Oracle solutions that provide remote administration capabilities. MCX also offers services that completely relieve its customers of the need to administer a database, so they can focus on their business.

The market leader in the Netherlands for specialized Oracle product support, MCX hosts or remotely administers about 600 databases on over 200 servers for about 80 organizations.

As the number of databases, data volume, and customer traffic increased, MCX's SAN began struggling to handle the load.

MCX Technician, Christian Spaans described the problem: "Our SAN's read performance was slowing, particularly when transaction volume was high and when running large batches overnight. We maintain the highest performance levels for our customers, so we needed to improve OLTP performance and batch job times, while ensuring we could support future growth. While we had more than enough capacity, we were not satisfied with loads during peak hours - and upgrading our SAN would be inefficient."

The Solution

Christian said, "When Oracle announced its Smart Flash Cache with 11g R2, we knew that it could create a cache that would eliminate our I/O problems. With the lowest latency on the market, we knew Fusion-io would be the best solid-state caching device to back it with."

Caching for Performance

The ioDrives with Oracle Smart Flash Cache allowed MCX to make gigabytes of high-performance memory available to Oracle instances. The result is performance similar to putting the database in DRAM.

Christian said, "With the Fusion-io cache, average read access times are much faster.  The average read on our NAS takes 3 milliseconds, while the average read from the ioDrive takes 0.4 milliseconds. Since we deployed the cache, overall performance on a production Oracle instance has improved 60-80% on a daily basis and 68% on average."

Christian added that the result is better service to its customers: "Our customers now have consistently faster response times under any workload, at any time of day."

A More Efficient and Cost Effective System

In addition to eliminating performance problems, the Fusion Powered system cost less than competing solutions.

"We couldn't consider a comparable SAN upgrade," Christian said. "We could have put our entire database in DRAM, but since we can only fit 96GB in each blade server, we would have had to buy more blades to house the DRAM."

It also made better use of their existing hardware, giving MCX room for future growth.

Christian said, "Moving our high-traffic and heavy load into the cache has taken the burden off our SAN. This  will allow us to add more instances and customers without scaling out."

Implementation in Under an Hour

Another big benefit of the Fusion Powered system was the ease with which MCX implemented the solution. Rather than adding more servers and another SAN - and managing the complexity of configuring a new system - MCX added the Oracle Smart Flash Cache in about an hour.

Christian said, "Implementing the cache was quite easy. Installing the Fusion device took about 30 minutes and configuring Oracle Smart Flash Cache took about another 30 minutes."

System Changes

Database System Before

Database Server

• Two blade chassis (eight blade servers in each)
• Three blade chassis (16 blade servers in each)
• NAS Filer

 

Changes to Database System

• Added one 320GB ioDrive to one blade server
• Configured Oracle to use this cache for highest-load databases

Summary

Implementing Fusion-io delivered MCX the following benefits:

• 7.5x faster read operations
• 60-80% faster instance performance
• Consistently high performance for end-users
• Added gigabytes of high-performance solid-state cache
• More than doubled transaction and data load capability with same infrastructure
• Eased load on SAN to better support growing customer base

Christian told us, "We are very happy with Fusion-io. We could have eliminated our problems by putting our entire database in RAM, but that would have been much more expensive."

About the Company

MCX Administration Services was started in 1999 to provide advanced technical support for Oracle products such as the Oracle E-Business suite and other custom Oracle-based products. It provides custom, hosted Oracle solutions that provide remote administration capabilities as well as services to completely relieve its customers of the need to administer a database so they can focus on their business.

MCX is the market leader in the Netherlands for specialized Oracle product support and hosts about 600 databases on over 200 servers for about 80 organizations worldwide.

Website:  www.mcx.nl
Email:  info@mcx.nl