Smarter Storage, Awesome Efficiency

So I’m in the middle, once again, of planning a summer vacation. If only I had no constraints on funding — I would then take a plane any day and any time that I really wanted to. And I could leave from the airport that is actually near where I live. And not over an hour away. Oh, I forgot — I could actually buy the plane and a pilot.

I would stay at the super fancy grand hotel in the grandest of suites, and not the poor stepsister motel down the road with the jacuzzi that foams dirt. I would have dinner in the grand dining room of the aforementioned grand hotel – and I wouldn’t worry about the dress code because I wouldn’t have to.

With no constraints, you can certainly do amazing things. But the important point here is what you can accomplish with constraints. With limited funds. With greater efficiency.

And that’s where today’s IBM announcement of Smarter Storage comes in. Take a look at What’s New including IBM Storwize V7000 and SAN Volume Controller (SVC) Real-time Compression and the IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center. Watch a video of a really awesome performance story. My favorite part of the announcement is this: You can get 3x the performance improvement with only 3% SSDs.

A 3 year old can swamp a configuration with SSDs and get better performance. The IBM Smarter Storage way is a more efficient, automated and intelligent approach to storage. Efficient by design, Self-optimizing, and Cloud agile.

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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.

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Performance in a Flash: New IBM XIV SSD Caching

3 ways that caching can help performance:

Caching is a type of animal behavior where an animal will store food in times of surplus for times when food is less plentiful. The place where the food is stored is called a cache and it is hidden from competing individuals. Caching can be on a long-term basis – cached on a seasonal cycle, with food to be consumed months down the line. Think acorns and squirrels. Where I live, caching is what gets a squirrel through the long cold snowy winter. So you see, caching helps performance.

Geocaching is an outdoor sporting activity, hiding and seeking containers, called “caches.” This “game of high-tech hide and seek” can involve toys and Tupperware. I helped an 8 year old find this treasure long before one relied on a GPS to tell you exactly where the cache was. The best part of this activity, in my opinion, was the extremely long walks on mid summer evenings, sometimes in gigantic mile-wide circles, to find what was hidden. I was never so fit. So you see, caching helps performance.

IBM has just announced XIV with SSD Caching. High capacity SSDs are used as secondary cache (400GB SSD device can be added to each module, 6TB of cache per rack, scales with the system – 6 to 15 SSD drives). No tuning necessary.

And the very best part — nearly 3X IOPS increase for OLTP workloads. And other amazingly impressive performance feats.

So you really see, caching helps performance.

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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, SSD, XIV,cache,caching,OLTP,volume,controller,benchmark,storage,IOPS,SPC,ASU,storage,flash,benchmarking

eX5 Does Mile High TPC-C

I often get tired during a long hike — but nothing a sit down and a few peanut M&Ms can’t take care of. But a few years ago, at about 9000 feet on the edge of a glacier in Montana, that certainly didn’t do the trick. I would walk about three steps, have to sit on a rock, and then I felt as if I wanted to sleep forever. Instead of the usual pondering of how many more miles did we have and how much higher did we have to go, I started to ask deeper questions like why in the world I was doing this at all. The view of the glacier was tremendous but was it worth the feeling that my body had been taken over by aliens?

When I think about “highest ever” I now wonder:

• Is it possible to enjoy hiking in the Rocky Mountains just for the weekend without acclimation?
• When the Junior Olympics are in Denver, do the athletes who make their homes in higher altitudes have an advantage?
• When planning a trip, do I now add altitude to the list of things I need to worry about besides weather, direct flights, crowds, and the language I have to communicate in?

 

But for our “highest ever” this week there are no questions. Just pure celebration. You see, the IBM System x3850 X5 and DB2 just delivered the highest x86-64 performance score ever achieved on the TPC-C benchmark.(1)

The TPC-C benchmark simulates an order-entry environment of a wholesale supplier — entering and delivering orders, recording payments, checking the status of orders, and monitoring the level of stock at the warehouses. TPC-C represents any industry that must manage, sell, or distribute a product or service. Current results show that clients who deploy IBM technology could see more orders entered, faster monitoring, distribution, and delivery.

This configuration used several cool newer technologies — IBM eX5 with E7 processors, MAX5 memory expansion, the amazing DB2 9.7, and SSD storage.

So tell your “highest ever” story here. Keeping it clean, of course.

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(1) IBM System x®3850 X5 (Intel Xeon E7-8870 processors 2.40GHz, 4 processors/40 cores/80 threads) result of 3,014,684 tpmC, $.59 USD/tpmC, available 9/22/11, DB2 9.7, SUSE Linux® Enterprise Server 11 (SP1),
Source: http://www.tpc.org. Results current as of 8/3/11.

TPC-C ,TPC-H, and TPC-E are trademarks of the Transaction Performance Processing Council (TPPC).

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.

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