HP DL145 HP InfiniBand Solution for Oracle Application Server white paper - Page 2

Overview This whitepaper explains how to implement an Oracle Applications Server (AS) J2EE solution for the database connection using HP ProLiant servers, HP StorageWorks, and HP InfiniBand™ options. The whitepaper is intended for system administrators, system architects, and systems integrators who are considering the advantages of HP InfiniBand-based systems in an Oracle AS J2EE environment. Oracle Application Server overview Oracle AS is a fully integrated application server - including a J2EE Compatible container, an enterprise portal, wireless, business intelligence, single sign-on using a LDAP compliant directory, and much more. It is the integrated nature of Oracle AS that distinguishes it in the marketplace. Oracle strives not only to provide a container for J2EE applications, but to enable J2EE applications to be managed more easily, deployed as web services, accessed via a single sign-on, made more secure, and tied more closely to business level activities. Typically, the Oracle AS is installed on its own server or set of servers and these servers access an Oracle database instance on another server across a network. The most typical network connection between Oracle AS server and the Oracle database server is via TCP/IP over Ethernet. A typical Oracle Application Server system has the following components: • One or more application servers • Oracle database instance • Public local area network (LAN) Advantages of InfiniBand in an Oracle Application Server environment The most common method of communication between application server machines and database server machines today is TCP/IP over Ethernet. TCP/IP and Ethernet both have limitations. The TCP/IP processing on the application server and database server machines can result in substantial CPU utilization on both machines with typical latencies of 50 to 100 microseconds (µs). Additionally, observed Gigabit Ethernet throughput is limited to approximately 0.8 gigabits per second (Gbps) on a single network interface card (NIC). InfiniBand, a standards-based alternative to Ethernet, overcomes the performance limitations of TCP/IP-based solutions. The key advantages of InfiniBand over TCP/IP and Ethernet is InfiniBand's high throughput, low CPU utilization, and ultra-low latency. The current InfiniBand bandwidth of 10 Gbps1 provides observed performance over 8 Gbps. CPU utilization of only 1-3 % with latency less than 5 µs is possible. InfiniBand supports its own InfiniBand-specific protocol, sockets direct protocol (SDP). This is the standard wire protocol for the InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) for support of stream sockets (SOCK_STREAM) networking over IBA. There are two different versions of SDP protocol that are supported by Oracle. The first is native SDP support, where the Oracle product implements the SDP directly. The second protocol, called Transparent SDP, is where the Oracle product is configured to use TCP, and the SDP protocol provider converts TCP connections to SDP without any configuration changes at the Oracle level. Native SDP provides support for asynchronous I/O, whereas Transparent SDP only supports synchronous I/O. Because it supports asynchronous I/O, native SDP supports one of the most important features of InfiniBand - remote direct memory access (RDMA). RDMA is a communications technique that allows data to be transmitted from the memory of one computer to the memory of another computer without 1 InfiniBand 10Gbps bandwidth is represented as 4x or four lanes of traffic each at 2.5 Gbps. 2