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Home >> Success Stories >> Astro Shapes Success Stories
FlashDisk Gives Sluggish Oracle Databases a Workout The Organization -- www.astroshapes.com Founded in 1971 a few miles outside of Cleveland in Struthers, Ohio, Astro Shapes manufactures custom-finished aluminum extrusions for industries ranging from medical to construction. Excellent customer service and attention to product quality have become a hallmark of Astro Shapes' ISO-9002 Total Quality Management program. Astro Shapes has grown both in physical size and in stature throughout the area. The extrusion presses at Astro Shapes' new, $12 million, 250,000-square foot plant can handle a diverse range of intricate shapes with different lengths, widths, and weights. Also located at the same facility, Astro Coating, a sister company, operates a 25-foot vertical spray system, which can paint up to 150,000 extrusions per day. The grounds at this new facility also include a baseball field used by area high school teams and college teams. Astro Shapes is Struthers largest employer. FlashDisk Customer Profile as Told By Astro Shapes "For every transaction, an Oracle database writes four concurrent processes once. This procedure imposes a lot of write contention on a disk. Thus disk contention remains the greatest constraint at the server level. Oracle, however, gives you some very specific information on what types of disk configurations to use and how to overcome disk write contention. Since we're putting a lot of data into our Oracle transaction database, we needed to have faster writes and disks that could handle the write contention. Our SCSI JBOD (just a bunch of disks) didn't have the ability to give us the greater performance we needed. That's why we turned to the external FlashDisk, a RAID storage system from Winchester Systems. We knew we could achieve greater performance through the FlashDisk's virtual 128-MB of RAM disk caching. At the same time, we could set up the open systems FlashDisk in a configuration consistent with Oracle recommendations. FlashDisk also allowed us to consolidate servers, as well as the databases. Three Oracle 7 databases - manufacturing, financial, and labor - got moved to one server, a new Sun Enterprise 450 running Solaris 7 OS, and a FlaskDisk with 12, 9-Gbytes disk drives. Before, we had the three databases on three Compaq Proliant servers with internal JBOD. To get the best performance for our application, we tested the FlashDisk's virtual caching in various configurations - RAID 5, 0+1, 1+0, and the basic one-to-one, non-mirrored configuration. The 0+1 configuration of writing to two mirrored disks at the same time gave us a good balance between redundancy of disks and performance. Normally our SCSI JBOD provided about 250 I/Os per second of writes. Based on further tests, the FlashDisk wrote three to four times faster than our SCSI JBOD. In addition to writes, the FlashDisk made our reads go way up. Even our employees noticed the difference in speed. They could pull information for reports and process their transactions faster than with the previous system. Some employees said that reports that took two or three minutes to process dropped down to 30 seconds. We didn't have to modify any code to get this speed, either. Employees no longer call the help desk complaining the database is too slow. Members of the technical staff also noticed at how fast the FlashDisk performed some routine tasks, such as creating tables. You don't have to come out of the storage system to copy from one sector of the disk to another section. The copy happens almost as fast as one can type the table command. The FlashDisk has bought us time to think about the best way to handle our application and data growth. We used to tune Oracle quite a bit to speed up the writes at the expense of the reads. We, however, haven't had to do this. We also looked at building a data warehouse as another solution to our performance problem. One idea included taking a lot of data out of the older database and putting it on a set of disks. By doing this, we thought we could get better performance from our manufacturing database. Since the FlashDisk's speed can handle both the operational system and the reporting, we don't have to build a data warehouse right away. If we decide to go in this direction, we can use the FlashDisk with any type of a server. We can easily add drives to our FlashDisk to increase the overall storage capacity. As a result of the FlashDisk, we no longer have a disk contention problem. We're able to get information in and out of the server very quickly, too. Every Oracle database can differ depending on how you intend to use it. The FlashDisk gives an organization the flexibility to create an Oracle storage system to suit the needs of the application, as well as the organization. The combination of Oracle, Sun, and Winchester Systems has not only given us great performance, but also the great price performance. We could've gotten the same type of performance from a Sun storage system, but we would've paid two or three times the price of the FlashDisk."
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