Selecting Infiniband or 10GbE
The Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance can be configured with either Infiniband or 10GbE for the purpose of connecting to an Exadata Database Machine.
Exadata utilizes a native Infiniband infrastructure that provides increased bandwidth, lower latency and reduced system resources utilization compared to 10GbE. The Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance can integrate seamlessly by connecting to the two Infiniband leaf switches (NM2-36P) that are pre-configured in the Exadata rack.
In many situations it is recommended to utilize Infiniband when connecting to Exadata due to the superior performance that can be realized. However, in some situations 10GbE will make a better choice. Some examples of these situations include distance limitations that make Infiniband deployments prohibitive or backing up five or more isolated Exadatas to a single Oracle ZS5-4.
An Infiniband link provides equal or superior performance to a 10GbE link under all workloads. However, certain disk IOPS intensive workloads like OLTP direct database will not see a significant benefit of utilizing Infiniband. Because of this, 10GbE is a good fit for these workloads.
