OCZ has issued a new case study which shows the improvements of Oracle database performance and I/O access in court proceedings at Supreme Court of Italy with OCZ's PCIe-based virtualized solution. Written by Scott Harlin, the case study shows the results gained from combination of tthe Z-Drive R4 PCIe SSDs and VXL Cache and Virtualization software when compared to SAN storage.

The case study focuses on The Supreme Court of Italy (Corte Suprema di Cassazione) which uses Oracle database for security and archival purposes for their digitally stored proceedings and rely on giving quick access to trial's information to prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, legal administrators and the media. Due to a rising number of proceedings stored on virtualized hard drive-based storage area network (SAN) and increased data traffic, the disk I/O became a performance bottleneck easily solvable by use of OCZ's Z-Drive R4 PCI-Express flash-based SSDs paired up with VXL Cache and Virtualization Software.

While the previously used HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8, dual processor, 8-core server resource and VMware ESX software connected to HP P2000 G3 SAN Array with 17 HDDs and 7.5TB of storage capacity sound impressive the Oracle database performance and data I/O access were taxed by hard drive limitations. Delivering a few hundred IOPS of performance with 10k HDDs, it was obvious that the fourth generation of the Z-Drive SSD with 410,000 random write IOPS and 275,000 random read IOPS was a logical choice.

The case study shows that the combination of the OCZ's Z-Drive R4 PCIe SSD with VXL Software is much better solution for virtualized Oracle database applications by providing increased server utilization, reduced SAN costs and high efficient flash utilization which resulted in 60 percent improvements in Oracle database performance.

In case you are interested in results as well as the implementation, you can download the full case study below.











Source: OCZ.com.