I/O Resource Management and Instance Caging

Abstract

I/O Resource Management (IORM) provides a means to govern I/O from different workloads in the Exadata Database Machine. Database consolidation is a key driver to customer adoption of Exadata, and consolidation means that multiple databases and applications will typically share Exadata storage. Different databases in a shared storage grid typically have different I/O performance requirements, and one of the common challenges with shared storage infrastructures, in general, is that of competing I/O workloads. Non-Exadata Oracle environments historically have attempted to address this challenge by over-provisioning storage, but this can become expensive and yield performance behavior that it is difficult to measure and predict.