Introduction

This study aims to produce guidelines for disk configuration and tuning hints with regard to ECKD and FCP disk devices, and specifically for the stand-alone Oracle Database using a transactional workload (OLTP), which is a very typical database workload.

System z® provides two different disk types, ECKD and FCP disks, with many additional features, some of which are prized features. The various configurations that are possible within Linux® increase the amount of configuration variants available for applications such as a database on Linux on System z.

This study aims to produce guidelines for disk configuration and tuning hints with regard to ECKD and FCP disk devices, and specifically for the stand-alone Oracle Database using a transactional workload (OLTP), which is a very typical database workload.

The Oracle Database was used as single instance database server, installed together with the Oracle grid architecture and the Automatic Storage Manager. The Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) was used to manage the disks. The setup was installed in a LPAR from System z 196 EC.

When we started this study the available Oracle release was 10g. But very shortly after this study was started, Oracle release 11g became available for Linux on System z. This provided a good reason to switch to the new version as well as offering the possibility to examine what advantages the new release has over the previous release.

The objective of this paper is to help you decide which disk type is appropriate and to describe how to optimize disk throughput rates.