Linux on Power - Doubling your performance

Using open source to improve the price / performancedynamics of managing dataRobin Porter

Business Development Manager

James FreemanEnterprise Architect

Inspired open source

solutions

19th November 2013

Established 2007

One of the fastest growing Red Hat partners in UK

Open source software

development house

2011 launched

solutions and services

Specialists in Virtualisation

and Database I/S

Technical solutions focus

Data Explosion and the need for open source

•90% of the worlds data was created in the last two years

•Majority is ‘unstructured’

•Oracle dominate RDBMS

•PostgreSQL is the fastest growing open source database

Open Source is the future

• All organisations are looking to cut costs - Database infrastructure is #1

• Open source technologies deliver substantial cost savings

• EnterpriseDB have made PostgreSQL Enterprise ready and delivered Oracle compatibility

• 80% savings on licensing - is x86 the best hardware platform ?

• Proof of concept - performance benchmarking

Linux Performance on Power

• Power7+ CPU Platform has huge potential - CISC vs. RISC

• Especially for large multi-threaded workloads

• But - development effort is still focussed on x86

• Don’t expect best performance out of the box

• Tune. Tune. Tune.

Case Study - PostgreSQL

• PostgreSQL 9.2.4

• Big performance improvements over 9.1 and earlier

• Especially multi-user workloads

• Two types of benchmark

• pgbench SELECT - simple reporting query benchmark

• HammerDB - based on industry standard TPC-C benchmark simulating OLTP workloads

• Reference system IBM X3650 M4 - 2 x Xeon E5-2680 - 16 core, 512GB RAM

• Equivalently priced x86 tin

pgbench - Step 1 - “Out of the box”

• Compiled from source

• Default toolchain

• Factory configuration on hardware

• Power7 = 31% more TPS than x86 !

31%

But.. we can do better

• All tuning work undertaken in house at Quru

• No source code changes

• Under the guidance of IBM Raleigh / Montpellier

• We managed to beat their results !

pgbench - Step 2 - “Tuned”

• 2 months testing and tuning

• Re-compiled code

• Hardware performance tuned

• Kernel performance tuned

• Application binaries profiled

99%

52%

31%

HammerDB - TPC-C Benchmarks

• Tuning gives PowerLinux competitive advantage

• Power7 = 58% more NOPM than x86 !

58%

Quru tuning unlocks the performance of PowerLinux

• SPEC CPU2006

• Publicly available at http://www.spec.org

• “Base” figures are untuned - strict guidelines

• “Peak” figures are tuned - freedom for tuning allowed

Conclusions

• Quru achieved a significant uplift in performance

• Every environment is unique so tuning is essential

• Our integrated solution is the future of Oracle cost containment in the enterprise

• To find out more check out www.quru.com/ibmpower

• Two whitepapers to follow and an event 10th December at IBM Southbank

Thank You