I apologize that this is so long but it's kind of complicated and I don't want to blow my budget on the wrong stuff.
I've got a mixed use 3070A at 7.3.1P2D11 hosting FC based AIX boxes (about 4k IOPS average, 90+% reads), 300 or so VMs (NFS, 3k IOPS average) and 1,000 users home/departmental shares via CIFS and NFS (2500 IOPS on a busy day. Oracle is starting to get a bit pokey and I've budgeted for some upgrades this coming quarter. The question is should I be buying spindles or PAM cards. Currently this load is spread across 231 spindles in wide stripes (minimum 12 disks per RG). So not great performance but it also takes a big spike to have a major negative impact as well.
I have good performance metrics for everything except Oracle, which for some reason is seeing poor performance even though latency and throughput look good. Of course there is no DBA running this database so I suspect at least part of the problem is on the Oracle side but for now I have to assume that's not going to improve. Currently we are already observing a very good cache hit % so I am questioning if the PAM cards will give any benefit there. On the other hand statit shows that 2/3 of the IO from disk is still reads so I think maybe there would be a benefit and I know it would be great for file shares & VMs (which are also on deduped volumes so it's my understanding the cache from the PAM cards would be even more effective).
* How do I determine what to purchase? * What's does the "seek time" for data read from PAM? * I'm getting to the point where the 3070 is going to work really hard in a fail over situation, if PAM cards can service a lot more requests in a short period if the data is cached on SSD will this put more load on my CPUs? * Why did NetApp name them Pam? It's not the 60's, they should be named Shelby or Logan cards or something?
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