Enhance workloads for multicloud environments with Oracle Cloud and Equinix

The Equinix distributed cloud solution for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) optimizes applications and database workloads for complex hybrid environments that entail systems in a mix of on-premises and public cloud ecosystems. Equinix Interconnection platform capabilities enable high-performance, low-latency and secure connections between data housed in their metro colocation centers and applications that reside on Oracle’s public cloud.

Oracle is the largest database management company and ranked by Forbes as the third largest software company in the world in 2020. Over four decades, Oracle has delivered innovation upon which entire industries have been built. Oracle revenues touched US$42B in 2022 with 430,000 customers and global sales in 175 countries. Equinix is the world’s digital infrastructure company. Their global ecosystem provides customers access to 2,100 network services, over 3,000 cloud and IT services, more than 450 content and digital media services, and 4,800 enterprises. They have 248 data centers in 71 metros globally across 32 countries.

Through Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric and its API integration with Oracle Cloud network services, including FastConnect Partner Edition, customers can establish direct connectivity between their private infrastructure and OCI environments. This combination helps them fully realize the benefits of hybrid cloud in a reliable, low-latency secure experience, such as moving application, middleware, and database workloads seamlessly between private infrastructure and OCI.

The result is improved application performance, lower latency, higher throughput, network-level security protection and reduced costs, all in a highly scalable solution. This configuration is also ideal for data privacy, regulatory compliance, and data sovereignty scenarios.

Customer use case for distributed cloud solutions

The Equinix and Oracle teams worked with a large system integrator responsible for hosting an extreme online transaction processing (OLTP), high-throughput application serving many customers in Exadata Cloud service. For their biggest customers, Oracle Exadata Extreme Flash (EF) is ideal to accommodate transaction throughput with lower latency. Since EF storage cells aren’t available in Exadata Cloud, Oracle Solution Center suggested an alternative model.

So, they adapted and ran this proof of concept (POC) the application tier’s latency in OCI to cloud-adjacent Exadata-X8 (Hybrid Cloud Database), co-located at Equinix’s Ashburn (ASH) data center. Coupled with Equinix crossconnect, the data tier met the sub-millisecond latency requirements for the OLTP application.

Scope

The scope of this test was to determine feasibility of using the Hybrid Cloud Database cloud-adjacent architecture for the system integrator, using the Exadata platform to host the database while applications reside in OCI. The overall goal was for the system integrator’s test application to maintain stability and improvement by using this architecture. Both the Equinix Solution Validation Center (SVC) and the Oracle Solution Center teams jointly provided the testing environment. Running the testing process for the POC included the system integrator, Oracle, and Equinix personnel.

Oracle and Equinix provided hardware infrastructure for database software and networking. Working with Oracle and Equinix, the system integrator determined sample data and test cases. Tests measured the application latency from the system integrator’s OCI environment to the hosted database environment. Evaluation was based on the applicability to the system integrator’s application.

Architecture diagram

The Equinix Solution Validation Centers utilized the Equinix Fabric and Juniper network infrastructure.

On the left hand side is the Oracle Exadata rack, which connects to the Platform Equinix in the middle of the graphic. Inside the Platform Equinix, is the Solution Validation Center. Underneath the Solution Validation Center, there are boxes that span from left to right of the Platform Equinix, which includes Cross Connect, Switch, Router, and Equinix Fabric. On the right hand side is Oracle Cloud, which connects directly into the Platform Equinix. There is a BGP Peering Network that connects Router to Oracle Cloud as well.
Figure 1: A graphic depicting the architecture diagram for the Oracle Exadata and Platform Equinix solution.

Success criteria

For the staged build detail, the system integrator built the database and test data to test operational efficiencies of the Exadata machine using OCI Database service on Flash Cache and EF storage with high-throughput transactions for workloads generated using sample Swingbench and SLOB applications. Testing also used publicly available, non-business data, such as Swingbench, SLOB, and RPOV.

Exadata used the following configuration for tests:

• Number of clusters (Default is 1, using all database and cell nodes): 1 cluster and 2 RAC nodes
• For each cluster, number of cores: 39 cores
• Size of RAM: 600 GB
• Size for grid disks (DATA and RECO default is 80:20) + DATA: 40 TB
• Oracle relationship database management system software version (Per cluster): 19.16

 

Success factor	Description	Quantifiable target
Latency of app to database	Measure Swingbench app to Oracle database scalability across 2 RAC nodes and the latencies for high volume OLTP transactions	Less than 1 ms
IOPS measurements	Test IOPS across 2 nodes for an 40–80 TB Oracle database	820k–1 Million IOPS
Network latency test to secondary Equinix IDC	Network latency test from OCI to secondary Equinix IDC where the Secondary standby database exists in the same region	Less than 1 ms

 

Database on Exadata saw the following results:

• Consistent I/O performance observed from only Flash drives being used for data.
• Issues seen in the OCI Exadata infra, such as performance warmup from disk to flash not occurring with this architecture.
• IOPs performance observed showed approximately 650,000 IOPs at <1 ms for the R90-W10 OLTP workload and approximately 500,000 IOPs for the R80-W20 workload.

 

The OCI to Equinix app to Database network latency saw the following results:

• Average latency observed between 0.4–0.6 ms. Spikes in average latency to 0.8 ms were assumed because of shared infrastructure impact from the Oracle Solution Center’s data center.
• Testing from all three OCI availability domains and data centers showed latency in the 0.4–0.6 ms range.

Key results and takeaways

The network latency tests from applications running on OCI to the database running in Exadata in the Equinix cage in Ashburn averaged between 0.6–0.8 ms on a two-node RAC database scaling to 850K IOPs. For meeting the stringent demands of 1 Million IOPs at latency rates averaging 0.6–0.8 ms from the system integrator’s application, we recommended a database on Exadata X9-M2 with EF storage servers with an all-flash configuration with 8 NVMe PCI Flash drives, each with 6.4 TB of raw storage.

This POC enabled the system integrator to determine feasibility of using an Exadata platform to host the database while applications reside in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The POC’s overarching outcome served the system integrator’s ability to maintain stability and improvement by using this architecture.

For more information, see the following resources:

• Technical Case Studies
• Try OCI services for free

 

This joint case study was co-authored by: