Anyone playing with this sort of configuration?

I know that there's been talk of using SSDs, but there's an offshoot of ssds on PCI-e cards. Was wondering if anyone has been playing with IDS 10, or 11 using SSDs on the primary, then doing replication to a server with SAS drives and some more space. I'm assuming that the OLTP db wouldn't be too large (under 250 GB total) for everything. In theory, this could be the same box... using virtualization. 2 socket (8 core) total with 4 cores per server and tons of memory. Has anyone thought about this? Is the pci-e cards/ssds faster than SATA-3? Would be doing raid 10 on both SSD and SAS drives. Thoughts? Another configuration for a retail server would be a small lower power Intel 5500 series chips. quad core, and ssd drives in a raid 10 configuration. This would be ideal to ship 2, one Unit high rackable servers, prebuilt and loaded on to small machine w SSDs in to a store where you don't really have high OLTP volume. Maybe peak 100-500 tpm during holiday. Again a single low wattage 4 core, tied to a twin for redundancy. In theory, machine could be smaller, less prone to dust and less than perfect environments. Could in theory go even smaller... Thoughts? _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ Hotmail®: Celebrate the moment with your favorite sports pics. Check it out. http://www.windowslive.com/Online/Hotmail/Campaign/QuickAdd?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_QA_HM_sports_photos_072009&cat=sports

Ian Michael Gumby schrieb: > I know that there's been talk of using SSDs, but there's an offshoot of ssds on PCI-e cards. > > Was wondering if anyone has been playing with IDS 10, or 11 using SSDs on the primary, then doing replication to a server with SAS drives and some more space. > > I'm assuming that the OLTP db wouldn't be too large (under 250 GB total) for everything. > > In theory, this could be the same box... using virtualization. 2 socket (8 core) total with 4 cores per server and tons of memory. > > Has anyone thought about this? > > Is the pci-e cards/ssds faster than SATA-3? > > Would be doing raid 10 on both SSD and SAS drives. > > Thoughts? > > Another configuration for a retail server would be a small lower power Intel 5500 series chips. quad core, and ssd drives in a raid 10 configuration. This would be ideal to ship 2, one Unit high rackable servers, prebuilt and loaded on to small machine w SSDs in to a store where you don't really have high OLTP volume. Maybe peak 100-500 tpm during holiday. > > Again a single low wattage 4 core, tied to a twin for redundancy. In theory, machine could be smaller, less prone to dust and less than perfect environments. Could in theory go even smaller... > > Thoughts? > > > _________________________________________________________________ > Windows Live' Hotmail': Celebrate the moment with your favorite sports pics. Check it out. > http://www.windowslive.com/Online/Hotmail/Campaign/QuickAdd?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_QA_HM_sports_photos_072009&cat=sports Hi, SSD is not equal SSD If you thinking of flash memory (aka NAND) SSDs there are still 2 types MLC (Multilayer, cheaper) and SLC SSDs (faster). What I alredy tested is: 1) almost every Intel Nehalem Xeon setup ist more than 30% faster than the fastest SPARC setup available - if I meassure how many 2KB buffers can be checked by a CPUvp per second. 1A) same goes for the new 6 core AMD CPUs, but there it is 40+% faster 1 and 1A want DDR3 1066+ memory, of course. When it comes to thruput of a PCIe card, you have to carefully select mobo and chipset, else it can happen, that you are not able to saturate the SSD behind the PCIe interface, IOPS-wise and 2KB blocksize. Always try to avoid OS driven cacheing in memory. The cache administration is far more compliated that an eays file system like ext2 or much better: raw disk setup. In other words there are SSDs on the market, which are faster if not cached by the OS. We hope to be able to fully test & compare a M9000 (expensive) to a 4 socket 6way AMD system (cheap, but not very cheap) with 256 GB mem & having 4 PCIe slots and we expect to just blow away the big iron. That means, I already know that can seqscan 230 GB of LRU buffers on the AMDs using 8 CPUvps of a 10 CPUvp IDS setup in less than 1 sec, wheres on the M9000 this is more like 8 secs. I also know, that using commodity PCIe SSDs from FUSION-IO I can seqscan using light scans the same 230 GB of 2 KB buffers in 4.1 seconds. CPU load on the AMD system is less than 6% when doing light scans and less than 16% when scanning in memory. The huge advantage of PCIe connected SSDs is that one saves a lot of latencies, which are small each, but accumulate if you compare PCIe SSDs to FC connected subsystems using SSDs. We also testing using Infortrend subsystems (very cheap) with 12 x 256 GB of SAMSUNG or OCZ 256 GB MLC SSDs (also cheap, around 500 EUR streetprice which is less than 2 EUR per GB). Setup is 5x2 RAID10 plus 2 spares. And we get *very* good results but this is about only half the speed of a DASD setup with PCIe SSDs, although 4Gbit FC. I cannot tell you anything about SAS disks, as we only use 3Gbit connected SATAII disks. All POCs which wanted to convince me how much faster the very much more expensive SAS disks are, just failed to be faster ;) Here me say another time: If you want better performance, you must spend less money.... We have a customer running a midsize IDS database (1.5 TB and 3000 concurrect users) OLTP in near synch HDR style, and the secondary is a cheapy system built from hand selected 'plastic' cheap parts, while the primary is a big system and a very expensive one. The simple test to exchange primary and secondary only revealed that the big & expensive setup was not able to cope with the load in secondary role. So the big machine is the bottleneck. About SSDs I spend 5-10 hrs per week to read www.storagesearch.com and I spend upto 50% of my time with testing different SSD setups on cheap systems using IDS, ORA11g and TimesTen, but also open source SQL database software. Good luck, you enter the right track, but you will make not many friends, if you start to know what sh*t is sold at high prices, and if you dare to write about it. dic_k PS: Ever installed XP-64 in less than 10 mins on a lappy? Just put in a 256 GB SAMSUNG SSD and install & see for yerselfe. -- Richard Kofler SOLID STATE EDV Dienstleistungen GmbH Vienna/Austria/Europe

> Hi, > > SSD is not equal SSD > If you thinking of flash memory (aka NAND) SSDs there are still 2 types > MLC (Multilayer, cheaper) and SLC SSDs (faster). > Right, I knew this. The question was more about PCIe over just relying on the SATA-3 interface. IBM released an SSD where half of the potential storage space was set aside for bad blocks. And the life spans of MLC vs SLC also differ. > What I alredy tested is: > 1) almost every Intel Nehalem Xeon setup ist more than 30% faster > than the fastest SPARC setup available - if I meassure how many > 2KB buffers can be checked by a CPUvp per second. > 1A) same goes for the new 6 core AMD CPUs, but there it is 40+% faster > > 1 and 1A want DDR3 1066+ memory, of course. > Well the SPARC is a little out of my price range and I'm not sure you are making a fair comparison. You're only testing on aspect of the CPU. I was looking a at building a Nehalem box (2 socket) 8 core total. But even then, I'd have to split the box in to two because of pricing on IDS. Its not a bad thing because I can put my database on one virtual server and then the e-mail and web, etc on the second server. One 2U high box supporting an entire SMB enterprise. Even here, you can be redundant and still be cost effective, although I don't know the impact of the licensing cost because you could keep the second box 'idle' or use it for load balancing. > When it comes to thruput of a PCIe card, you have to carefully select > mobo and chipset, else it can happen, that you are not able to saturate > the SSD behind the PCIe interface, IOPS-wise and 2KB blocksize. > Yeah, that's what I thought. Not all drive makers are the same. > Always try to avoid OS driven cacheing in memory. The cache administration > is far more compliated that an eays file system like ext2 or much better: > raw disk setup. > In other words there are SSDs on the market, which are faster > if not cached by the OS. > Well, since I was hoping to use the SSDs for IDS only, it would have been raw partitions. (Or semi cooked) > We hope to be able to fully test & compare a M9000 (expensive) to a > 4 socket 6way AMD system (cheap, but not very cheap) with 256 GB mem & > having 4 PCIe slots and we expect to just blow away the big iron. I don't know if that's a fair comparison. I think back in earlier posts, Sun has virtual cores because of the dual paths, yet they only have one path to the memory per core. This would effectively kill their performance / cost ratio on a RDBMS, but what about something that was more computational intensive? I *agree* that your benchmark is more meaningful if you're building out an RDBMS platform and in my target market, SMB clients, you can't beat Intel's quad core boards/boxes. I'm not saying AMD isn't also a bad choice, but I'm afraid of the 6 vs 4 core pricing of IDS. (Note: I'm looking at Java and an Open Source Web Server, running on OpenSuSE so my costs are mainly hardware and IDS.) > That means, I already know that can seqscan 230 GB of LRU buffers on > the AMDs using 8 CPUvps of a 10 CPUvp IDS setup in less than 1 sec, > wheres on the M9000 this is more like 8 secs. > I also know, that using commodity PCIe SSDs from FUSION-IO I can seqscan > using light scans the same 230 GB of 2 KB buffers in 4.1 seconds. > CPU load on the AMD system is less than 6% when doing light scans and less > than 16% when scanning in memory. > > The huge advantage of PCIe connected SSDs is that one saves a lot of > latencies, which are small each, but accumulate if you compare PCIe SSDs > to FC connected subsystems using SSDs. > Yeah and that's why I was thinking this would be a good way to go for one of my apps. I was looking at the Real Time Loader, but I believe there's a problem that if the number of inserts is high enough, the flushing from shared memory to disk becomes a bottle neck. The other reason for using SSD is that you can put them in a 'harsher' environment. Also the SSD should generate less heat and take more abuse like dust and shocks. (Assuming that I'm going SSD throughout and not just for IDS.) > We also testing using Infortrend subsystems (very cheap) with 12 x 256 GB > of SAMSUNG or OCZ 256 GB MLC SSDs (also cheap, around 500 EUR streetprice > which is less than 2 EUR per GB). Setup is 5x2 RAID10 plus 2 spares. > And we get *very* good results but this is about only half the speed > of a DASD setup with PCIe SSDs, although 4Gbit FC. > > I cannot tell you anything about SAS disks, as we only use 3Gbit > connected SATAII disks. SAS will beat SATA on performance. You have smaller drives, but they have a higher rotational speed. (15K). I'm looking at 2.5" 73.4 GB drives. Again this is a small business SMB box. Don't need 1-2 TBs of disk. > All POCs which wanted to convince me how much faster the very much > more expensive SAS disks are, just failed to be faster ;) > That's interesting. Its not just the drives, but also the controllers too. > Here me say another time: > If you want better performance, you must spend less money.... > > We have a customer running a midsize IDS database (1.5 TB and > 3000 concurrect users) OLTP in near synch HDR style, and the > secondary is a cheapy system built from hand selected 'plastic' cheap > parts, while the primary is a big system and a very expensive one. > The simple test to exchange primary and secondary only revealed > that the big & expensive setup was not able to cope with the load > in secondary role. So the big machine is the bottleneck. > 1.5 TB? And that's a midsize database? For OLTP systems, I'm looking at less than 1/10th of that, but probably more users. > About SSDs I spend 5-10 hrs per week to read > www.storagesearch.com > and I spend upto 50% of my time with testing different > SSD setups on cheap systems using IDS, ORA11g and > TimesTen, but also open source SQL database software. > > Good luck, you enter the right track, but you will make > not many friends, if you start to know what sh*t is sold > at high prices, and if you dare to write about it. > > dic_k > PS: Ever installed XP-64 in less than 10 mins on a lappy? > Just put in a 256 GB SAMSUNG SSD and install & see for yerselfe. > -- > Richard Kofler > SOLID STATE EDV > Dienstleistungen GmbH > Vienna/Austria/Europe > _______________________________________________ > Informix-list mailing list > Informix-list@iiug.org > http://www.iiug.org/mailman/listinfo/informix-list _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ SkyDrive™: Store, access, and share your photos. 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