Storage has changed dramatically over the last three years driven by SSD developments. Most of the key components necessary for a powerful storage system are available and the cost is highly favorable for direct placement of data files. Some additional infrastructure elements could greatly enhance the flexibility of storage systems with ...

The PerfMon Counters That Just Won't DieOne of the things that's simultaneously great and horrible about the Internet is that once something gets posted out in the ether, it basically never goes away.  (Some day, politicians will realize this.  We can easily fact check their consistency).  Because of longevity of content posted to ...

Intel officially announced the Xeon E5 2600 series processor based on Sandy Bridge-EP variant with upto 8 cores and 20MB LLC per socket. Only one TPC benchmark accompanied product launch, summary below. ProcessorsCores perFrequencyMemorySQLVendorTPC-E 2 x Xeon E5-269082.9GHz512GB (16x32GB)2012IBM1,863.23 2 x Xeon ...

If you haven't started to read Shashank Pawar (blog), you're missing out. Shashank is part of Microsoft Australia and has been writing some very good content lately. Here's an example from the Reference Architecture for High Performance SQL Server:HP and Microsoft engineering teams have worked together to create a reference architecture to ...

The arrival of the Sandy Bridge EN and EP processors, expected in early 2012, will mark the completion of a significant shift in Intel server strategy. For the longest time 1995-2009, the strategy had been to focus on producing a premium processor designed for 4-way systems that might also be used in 8-way systems and higher. The objective ...

There has been relatively litle activity in TPC Benchmarks recently with the exception of the raft of Dell TPC-H results with Exa Solutions. It could be that systems today are so powerful that few people feel the need for benchmarks. IBM published an 8-way Xeon E7 (Westmere-EX) TPC-E result of 4593 in August, slightly higher than the Fujitsu ...

Fusion-iO just announced the new ioDrive2 and ioDrive2 Duo on Oct 2011 (at some conference of no importance). The MLC models will be available late November and the SLC models afterwards. See the Fusion-iO press release for more info. Below are the Fusion-IO ioDrive2 and ioDrive2 Duo specifications. The general idea seems to be for the ...

Today, it is actually possible to build a highly capable database system in a laptop form factor. There is no point to running a production database on a laptop. The purpose of this is so that consultants (i.e., me), can investigate database performance issues without direct access to a full sized server. It is only necessary to have ...

IBM just published a TPC-H SF 1000 result for their x3850 X5, 4-way Xeon 7560 system featuring a special MAX5 memory expansion board to support 1.5TB memory. In Dec 2010, IBM also published a TPC-H SF1000 for their Power 780 system, 8-way, quad-core, (4 logical processors per physical core). The figure table below shows TPC-H SF 1000 ...

Fujitsu just published an astounding TPC-E benchmark result of 3,800 tpsE for their 8-way Xeon 7560 system, the Primergy RX900 S1. Fujitsu had previously published a TPC-E result of 2046.96 for their 4-way Xeon 7560 system, the Primergy RX600 S5. The new results shows 85.6% scaling from 4-socket to 8-socket. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 ...