This is one of the technical infrastructure data gathering methodologies and performance recommendations for server machines. The full list is defined in the Server Environment Recommendations topic here.
Performance of the storage used for the database has been measured when testing scalability of the STEP solution. The I/O performance has been measured as IOPS.
The requirements for the database are:
- up to 2,500 IOPS during normal operations
- up to 5,000 IOPS during peak operations
The STEP Oracle Database uses a block size of 8 KB. The read / write ratio is typically between 60/40 and 70/30.
The application server (including shared storage) requires 500 – 1,000 IOPS.
For more information, see the CPU and Storage section of the Infrastructure Checks topic here.
AWS EBS Storage Considerations
The following elements should be considered:
- EBS bandwidth — Depending on the chosen instance type, the EBS storage bandwidth varies. For example, the r4.4xlarge offers 3000 Mbit/s EBS storage bandwidth, whereas the r4.8xlarge offers 6000 Mbit/s.
If EBS bandwidth becomes a bottleneck, it is necessary to switch to the larger instance type.
- EBS IOPS (Provisioned IOPS or General Purpose SSD) — Depending on the chosen SSD volume type, it is possible to control how many IOPS that are available, which is important to the database storage performance.
- Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) offers 50 IOPS/GB.
- General Purpose SSD (gp2) offers 3 IOPS/GB and volumes can be striped to achieve higher IOPS than this.
Choose the solution that fulfills the storage performance requirements of 5.000+ IOPS at peak performance as described above.
Azure Storage Considerations
Performance testing of STEP in Azure shows that SSD storage is required for the Oracle database and for the shared storage covering workarea and upload for the application servers. In addition, SSD storage is preferred for the OS and software partitions of application servers as well as database servers. In Azure, SSD storage is referred to as Premium storage. Instance types in Azure that supports the use of SSD storage will have ‘s’ in its name like 'DSv3' or 'ESv3.'
In Azure, asset data can reside on non-SSD storage like Managed Disks or Unmanaged Disks, depending on if data must be highly available by managing replicas in other data centers or not.