A recent TPC-H benchmark produced the impressive performance and price-performance result of 1,050,556.20 QphH @30000GB with a price performance of $2.86/QphH @30000GB for a Sun/ParAccel cluster of 43 Sun Fire X4540 servers, each equipped with two AMD Opteron 2356 2.3 GHz processors, running ParAccel Analytic Database on Sun OpenSolaris 2009.06, reports blogger Guido Ficco on Sun's BestPerf site.

The only other 30TB result posted to date is on a single HP Superdome, powered by 64 x 1.6 GHz Itanium2 Dual Core processors running Oracle 10gR2. The HP result is 150,960 QphH @30000GB with a price-performance of $46.69/QphH @30000GB, writes Ficco, adding that the result establishes the overall leadership of the Sun/ParAccel/OpenSolaris cluster solution in Decision Support Systems (DSS) and Data Warehousing.

The particulars of this record are as follows:

• The Sun Fire X4540 / ParAccel Cluster was over seven time (7x) faster than the HP Superdome and had sixteen times (16x) better price-performance. In addition, the total cost of the Sun/ParAccel configuration (H/W + S/W + 3 years maintenance) is less than half of the total cost of the HP/Oracle configuration.

- The Sun Fire X4540 cluster storage consisted entirely of fully mirrored internal drives. There were almost 1000 fewer disk spindles than the HP Superdome solution (2064 vs. 3072 disks), resulting in an enormous reduction of hardware logistics, at a fraction of the floor space (172 RU vs 1120 RU).

• This solution is one of the TPC-H new-generation DSS DBMS (column based, shared nothing, data compression, etc.) results, according to Ficco, adding that it is noteworthy that all of the other new generation TPC-H submissions (at 100GB up to 3000GB) ran queries entirely from memory. This new result is disk based and thus establishes the leadership and viability of the Sun/ParAccel/OpenSolaris solution on shared nothing clusters for very large disk based databases -- much larger than memory sizes realistically available even in extremely large database installations.

- There are a number of new generation DBMS designed for Decision Support such as ParAccel, either currently for sale or still under development, all implemented on Linux. This result is the first public proof point of a new generation data warehousing product running on Solaris, more specifically OpenSolaris.

- The load time of the 30TB database on the Sun/ParAccel cluster was 4 times faster than the HP Superdome solution. For large DSS databases, load time is a very important factor.

Ficco notes that there was no external storage used in this benchmarking exercise and that the switches were 3 x 48 port Cisco 3750 + 4 x Cisco 3750 24 port 1Gb Ethernet Switches with OpenSolaris 2009.06 OS and ParAccel PADB database manager.

The audited results are as follows:

• Database Size: 30,000 GB (Scale Factor)
• TPC-H Composite: 1,050,566.20 QphH@30000GB
• Price/performance: $2.86 / QphH@30000GB
• Available: June 21, 2009
• Total 3 Year Cost: $3,006,861
• TPC-H Power: 1,326,910.40
• TPC-H Throughput: 831,758.00
• Database Load Time: ~3 Hours 29 minutes
• Storage Ratio: 32.04

More Information

Complete TPC Benchmark results

Sun Fire X4540 Server

OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris 2009.06 download [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter