A recent TPC-H benchmarking exercise at the 300GB scale factor involving Windows running on the Sun Fire X4600 M2 Server resulted in 2.80 $/QphH@300GB (USD) price-performance. The benchmarking employed Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 Enterprise database along with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 operating system. Similar benchmarking results were obtained for the HP DL785 and the IBM x3950 M2. This result is 14% better price performance than the HP DL785 result.

Additional findings from this benchmarking exercise include:

• The Sun Fire X4600 M2 trails HP's World Record single system performance (HP: 57,684 QphH@300GB, Sun: 55,185 QphH@300GB) by less than 5%.

• The Sun/SQL Server solution used fewer disks for the database (168) than the other top performance leaders @300GB.

• IBM required 79% more disks (300 total) than Sun to get a result of 46,034 QphH@300GB, which is 20% below Sun's QphH.

• HP required 21% more disks (204 total) than Sun to achieve a result of 3.24 $/QphH@300GB (USD) which is 16% worse than Sun's price performance.

The benchmarking results and configuration summary notes that the server was a Sun Fire X4600 M2 with 8 x AMD Opteron 8384, 2.7 GHz QC processors, 256 GB memory, and 3 x 73GB (15K RPM) internal SAS disks.

Storage configuration included 14 x Sun Storage J4200 each consisting of 12 x 146GB 15,000 RPM SAS disks, and software was Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64 Edition SP1 with the database manager SQL Server 2008 Enterprise x64 Edition SP1.

Blogger Senthis Ramanujam, who reported these results on Sun's Best Perf site notes these key points and best practices:

• SQL Server 2008 is able to take advantage of the lower latency local memory access provided on the Sun Fire 4600 M2 server. This was achieved by setting the NUMA initialization parameter to enable all NUMA optimizations.

• Enabling the Windows large-page feature provided a significant performance improvement. Because SQL Server 2008 manages its own memory buffer, the use of large-pages resulted in a significant performance increase. Note that to use large-pages, an application must be part of the large-page group of the OS (Windows).

• The 64-bit Windows OS and 64-bit SQL Server software were able to utilize the 256GB of memory available on the Sun Fire 4600 M2 server.

More Information

Sun Fire X4600 M2 TPC-H Executive Summary Report Acrobat PDF (562K)

Complete Sun Fire X4600 M2 TPC-H Full Disclosure Report Acrobat PDF (2347K) TPC Benchmark Website [...read more...]

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