British enterprise software firm Microgen likes to say that it makes 'impossible things possible.'
Power Systems. servers using POWER7. technology offer balanced system. The newest features of the POWER7 line include TurboCore., intelligent threading, Active Memory. Better price/performance helps drive reduced use as well.
A good way to do that is to break performance records.
The company announced yesterday that it managed to process 7 billion transactions per hour using in-memory processing on IBM System x and its Aptitude enterprise application platform.
With Oracle database-to-database processing running on a combination of IBM System x and IBM Power Systems, the company's platform processed more than 800 million transactions per hour.
The tests were conducted over three weeks at IBM's Innovation Centre at Hursley in Hampshire, England.
Big numbers like that are naturally for industry boasting, that's true. But the feat also promises improved computing for the finance, telecom, utilities and media sectors -- things like intra-day P&Ls, dynamic pricing treatments, daily product and customer profitability analyses, and so forth -- which translates to a better way to handle ballooning data volumes and, with luck, a competitive edge, too.
If BYOD is the story of 2012, 'big data' is definitely the one that's immediately behind it. The hype is huge, the potential seemingly limitless and the promises far-reaching. (Lightning-fast insights! Rapid application deployment! Cheaper maintenance! Legacy system integration!)
In fact, I'm hoping it will do my laundry, too -- then give me insight as to how efficient my wash was compared to the rest of the world's.
In all seriousness, though, the key to big data succeeding in handling scaling data volumes is staying one step ahead of them, itself scaling in performance. Exponential growth in input must be met with exponentially more powerful computing.
For now, Microgen's performance speeds are best suited for structured data such as transactions. But it's only a matter of time before that muscle works its way into other parts of the enterprise.
For the speeds 'n' feeds fans, I've included test details from Microgen below.
The tests were carried out using Microgen Aptitude Version 3.11 and Microgen Accounting Hub Version 3.05 Running on the following configuration of hardware, operating system and database:
Application Server
System InformationManufacturer: IBMProduct Name: IBM System x3850 X5 / x3950 X5 -[7143RHX]-
OS Information:Distributor ID: SUSE LINUXOS: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (x86_64)Release: 10
CPU Information:CPU model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E7- 8870 @ 2.40GHzPhysical CPU : 4CPU Cores : 10Sibling: 20 (Hyperthreading ON)
Memory Information:Memory Size : 132060340 kB
Database Server
System Information
Manufacturer: IBMProduct Name: IBM Power 750 Express (8233E8B)
OS Information:Distributor ID: IBMOS: AIX 1 7 00F61EF94C00 (64)Release: 7.1CPU Information:
CPU model name : IBM PowerPC_POWER7Physical CPU :24Processor Clock Speed : 3550 MHz
Memory Information:Memory Size : 65636 MB
Software installation:Database: Oracle Enterprise Server 11.2.0.1 upgraded to 11.2.0.3Client: Admin client installed on application server: version 11.2.0.1About the tests:
Three main tests were undertaken using the following scenarios:
1. Using in-memory data
The source data was generated in-memory and the targets were in-memory buffers. The results indicated good scaling up to 7 billion transactions per hour. This test shows the raw processing speed of Microgen Aptitude unconstrained by slower input/output devices, it measures the upper limit of the processing speed of the current version of Microgen Aptitude.
2. Using data from file on a SAN
In this case Microgen Aptitude read source data from a file, performed some processing and then wrote the output back to a file. The files were located on the SAN. Each input/output record contained 50 columns and was about 370 Bytes long. The results delivered some noteworthy observations, notably that the absolute performance levels were very high -- over one billion transactions per hour.
3. Using an Oracle 11g database
When the Oracle database was used for source data and target data, Microgen Aptitude was still able to deliver a very impressive result of around 800 million transactions per hour. This was achieved using the same data and business processes as for the previous tests.