Oracle recommends using one of two storage approaches with Oracle Commerce Guided Search implementations -- RAID or SAN-backed network-attached storage (if using RAID is not possible).
For RAID disks, use these recommendations.
Storage availability after disk failure is usually a requirement for your RAID configuration. In this case, you may opt for either a read/write balanced configuration or a more purely read-oriented configuration.
For most implementations, a configuration that balances the demands of disk read and write activities is the best choice.
RAID 5/6. For some implementations, disk read speed is paramount and write speed is much less important to performance. For example, suppose the baseline index is never modified by partial updates, and new baseline indexes are moved into production only infrequently. In these implementations, a RAID 5 (or RAID 6) configuration improves availability with the least cost in spindles.
RAID 10 (also known as RAID 1+0) is an excellent choice for devices that are partitioned across a disk array of four or more spindles. RAID 10 provides the performance benefits of striping and the redundancy of mirroring.
RAID 0. The RAID 0 configuration is useful when storage availability after disk failure is not a concern. This is because both read and write activities are parallelized across all available spindles to decrease access latency and increase read and write throughput.
In any RAID configuration, high rotational speeds (such as 15k RPM or 10k RPM) are very beneficial to performance. Performance-oriented RAID controller features, such as battery-backed write caching, or a large cache size within the RAID controller, are also very beneficial to performance.
Instead of using RAID disks, you can also use SAN-backed storage with a Fibre Channel backplane network from the MDEX Engine server to the SAN.
A storage area network (SAN) is a network to which remote storage devices are attached, usually accessible by a single machine in a one-to-one relationship. The storage devices appear to the operating system as locally attached to the server, rather than as disks attached to a network.
Note
Ensure that the SAN is properly configured. It is also preferable that the MDEX Engine have dedicated access to its own SAN disk arrays.
In Guided Search implementations, a SAN is in many cases faster and easier to work with than local storage. SAN-backed storage provides the following benefits:
Note
Network-attached storage with NFS delivers best performance on Oracle Exalogic systems. While NFS can be used on other systems, due to known performance issues, non-Exalogic use is not recommended in Oracle Commerce Guided Search implementations.
