Cisco UCS Gets the Nod From Oracle
So, we continue to see broad traction in the industry for the Cisco Unified Computing System. The latest passenger on the UCS Bus is Oracle, which recently certified and validated the Cisco UCS platform for Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.3 and Oracle VM.
As the picture illustrates, the test system was built around out UCS B-Series servers with EMC CLARiiON storage system with a mix of Fibre Channel drives and state- of-the-art Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) to further speed performance. Its important to note that, because the Cisco UCS is architecturally consistent across form factors, the same system could be built with the recently announced C-Series rack servers.
We have published a white paper on the tested deployment that digs into a fair amount of detail on the setup and configuration of the system—highly encouraged reading for anyone that supports Oracle in an enterprise environment. Please note, you will need to register to access the doc (any follow-up from us is on an opt-in basis).
One of the more interesting things things that came out of the testing was the performance data. We ran the cluster through 24h hrs stress tests for both OLTP (order entry) and DSS (sales history). The results included:
- Very consistent CPU utilization: around 40 percent on all eight nodes
- No saturation levels of any subsystems (CPU, disk, I/O, or networking)
- Sustained FCoE-based I/O ranging between 1.8 and 2.0 GB per second, which could be further divided into 1.4 GB per second of Fibre Channel I/O and approximately 450 MB per second of interconnect communication
- No occurrence of I/O bottlenecks or wait times
- Excellent I/O service times for storage
We attribute much of this consistency to the UCS architecture and its intrinsic 10GB fabric as well as the use of the EMC CLARiiON storage with EFDs. Note, this was not performance testing, there was no config optimization or the like done for this test, we were more interested in understanding how the system handled long-term sustained loads. We are working on performance benchmarking, so stay tuned for those if you are looking for numbers to compare to other solutions out there.
Finally, to learn more about how Cisco and Oracle are working together, check out our Oracle partner page. We have more info on both UCS and Application Networking solutions for Oracle, validation/certification information, and case studies available.
Posted by Omar Sultan at 09:49AM PST
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