Delphix Products

Hello everyone, We are migrating our Delphix environment to Exadata. When using a "full" Exadata environment, we are able to leverage the flash included in the storage cell to host heavily used tables. Are we able to leverage the flash storage in the Delphix environment? Will a VDB be able to access and use the flash in the storage cell? Thanks! Bill

Hi Bill-

I have a short answer and a long answer:

The short answer is that wherever some activity related to Delphix is limited by I/O speed, flash storage should improve that process.

The long answer is that there are some instances where Delphix benefits from faster I/O, and other instances where the benefit is negligible.

When the source database is on a server that uses flash storage, JDBC queries between the Delphix Engine and the source database should run faster. Disk I/O should be faster, and the database should, therefore, return results faster.

On the other hand, a VDB is nfs-mounted from the Delphix Engine by the target server. Even if the target server uses flash for storage, I would not expect much benefit, because Delphix holds those data on the DE. With the possible exception of the Delphix toolkit, Delphix performs very little disk I/O on the target server.

I hope this helps, let me know your progress,

-DM

Hi Bill,

In addition to what David described above, I would just like to clarify that Delphix would not be able to directly utilize the Exadata flash storage cells. The Delphix engine uses storage attached to it via the hypervisor (typically VMware vSphere) in the form of VMFS. This is used for both storing copies of source databases and provisioning virtual data files for the VDB. Exadata and the attached storage is proprietary and can only be used by Oracle as database storage.
Furthermore, any features supported by Exadata storage such as HCC, Smart Scan, Smart Flash Cache, Smart Flash Logging, Storage Indexes, IO RM.HCC would not work on a VDB. Delphix will use the memory and compute of the Exadata servers but provision the datafiles over NFS.

If there is a requirement to make the VDB use Exadata storage, you can move the datafiles using the method described here. Note however, once you move the files to ASM/Exadata, Delphix will no longer be able to refresh the VDB.

That said, you can still use Delphix to create copies of your production database with the caveats mentioned above. This will still provide the ability to migrate to Exadata and test migration plans fairly quickly by creating multiple VDBs from any point in time on your source database. Since you are migrating from non-Exadata, there should be no HCC concerns.

Let me know if this helps.

Thanks,
Leighton