Oracle, Blowin’ in the Wind

Oracle announced this morning the general availability of the Oracle Database Appliance X3-2. It now supports virtualization.

Hmmm, not exactly groundbreaking dare I say.

Along with this Oracle announcement were many claims of bigger and better — than a previous version.
With no real data and no real comparisons. And all I could think of was a Saturday morning a couple of months ago.

You see, I was in an industrial supply store this one Saturday morning (the things we do for love). Looking at, of all things, leaf blowers.

• Some models of these new leaf blowers claimed to blow harder that others. Surely harder than the old broken one at home. Which never really blew all that well. In fact, I probably ended up using my beloved rake more than that big hunk of plastic.
• These new leaf blowers claimed to be bigger and better. That meant that they actually weighed a ton more and had to be converted from a hand held model to a huge backpack. Ghostbuster time. And you needed earplugs.
• They let you try it out in the store. But instead of heavy wet leaves, they had you blow strips of paper.
• The advertised pricing did not include the expensive oil that you needed for it — without that specific oil, the machine would die.

So it comes down to the fact that claims are similar all over. But does the appliance finish the job fast, reliably, and at the right total price — so that you can get to what you really want to be doing.

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The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

technorati tags: IBM, systems, performance,Oracle,appliance,database,X3-2,virtualization,VM,SAS,storage,

WebLogic,benchmark,benchmarking

PureSystems, Bigger (and more Powerful) than a Bread Box

IBM PureSystems combine the flexibility of a general purpose system, the elasticity of cloud and the simplicity of an appliance tuned to the workload.

Recently I’ve been hearing something that I find odd — Because of the simplicity, flexibility, and integrated design of PureSystems, I’ve heard the “blade” word mentioned. I mean nodes or IT Elements(ITEs) are involved here. Does this mean that the form factor appearance equates in any way to performance? How big exactly is one of these things? And I don’t mean floor space.

Using the Power Systems Performance Report, for instance, let’s take a look at the rPerf numbers.

As we know, rPerf is an estimate of commercial processing performance relative to other IBM UNIX systems. It is derived from an IBM analytical model which uses characteristics from IBM internal workloads, TPC and SPEC benchmarks. The model simulates some of the system operations such as CPU, cache and memory.

An IBM PureSystems 32-core p460 at 3.55 GHz is 331.1. What’s your guess on what that system can be compared with? The answer is: a Power 750 at 331.06. What about a 16-core p260? The rPerf is 176.6 compared with 176.57 for a 16-core Power 750. No small potatoes.

The point here is that these systems do have the advantages of blades and appliances. They have superb systems management capabilities. But also a whole lot more — including powerful performance.

It may look a little like an appliance. It may smell somewhat like a blade. It may taste like bread. But it’s also amazing in the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

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Sources: http://www.tpc.org, http://www.spec.org. Results current as of 6/14/12.
TPC-C ,TPC-H, and TPC-E are trademarks of the Transaction Performance Processing Council (TPPC).
SPEC, SPECint, SPECfp, SPECjbb, SPECweb, SPECjAppServer, SPECjEnterprise, SPECjvm, SPECvirt, SPECompM, SPECompL, SPECsfs, SPECpower, SPEC MPI and SPECpower_ssj are trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC).
The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

technorati tags: IBM, systems, performance, SPEC, PureSystems,TPC,p460,750,POWER7,p260,benchmark,blade,Flex,

appliance,factor,rPerf,integrated,FSM,NGP,expert,cloud,UNIX,

Power,relative,benchmarking

Larry’s Guide to Announcing a New Product

Larry’s Guide to Announcing a New Product

Create a press release to say you will soon “share” something new with the rest of the world.

Announce that you don’t care if a certain part of your company’s business goes to zero – then in the same week launch a product based on that hardware.

Do not call your product anything that has the word “mini” in it.

Price the product so that it looks incredibly attractive – make sure not to include the huge cost of your database software in the price.

And by all means, absolutely under no circumstances announce any performance data, proof points, or benchmarks with your product announcement.

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The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

technorati tags: IBM, systems, performance, Oracle, database,appliance,Sun,X5675,Xeon,mini,benchmark,Exadata,11g,RAC,Linux,Intel,GbE,benchmarking

True Grit Benchmarking

A few weeks ago, I went to see True Grit. This comic-serious western, adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen from the novel by Charles Portis, focuses on a 14-year-old Arkansas girl who hires a man with "true grit" to hunt down her father’s killer. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what makes up true grit but I think it has something to do with being bold and gutsy, but with the backbone, bravery, courage and valor behind it.

Yesterday, HP published a press release on new appliances with Microsoft. The only reference to performance is a claim that the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance delivers amazingly faster queries than traditional SQL Server deployments. The footnote is very interesting. It basically says this claim is based on what some unnamed customer saw.

What is true grit when it comes to performance?

True grit is participating in an industry standard benchmark.

True grit is producing a white paper with detailed performance testing results.

True grit is publishing real results from a proof of concept at a client.

True grit is not saying you are x times faster than something based on what someone told you.

“The wicked flee when none pursueth.”

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The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

technorati tags: IBM, systems, performance, workload, HP,appliance,Microsoft,data warehouse,True Grit,SQL Server,benchmark,Enterprise,platform,data center,publication,benchmarking