Reading the New Fast Track Reference Architectures from HP & EMC
James Serra caught three new SQL Server 2014 Fast Track Data Warehouse Reference Architecture designs released by EMC, HP, and Lenovo. I love reading these because they show each vendor’s state-of-the-art storage infrastructure.
Two of them have remarkably similar goals – to hold a 28 TB data warehouse:
- From HP: HP DL380 G8 with local PCI Express solid state storage (PDF)
- From EMC: HP DL580 G7 with EMC VNX 5600 shared storage (PDF)
Here’s a simplified summary of their results:
A few things to take away here – first, and obviously, the HP storage wipes the floor with the EMC storage. It’s not clear from the limited test results if the EMC solution would have been more competitive had it used modern CPUs. The EMC one was built with an HP DL580, a 4-socket server, using older CPUs, and it left two of the CPU sockets empty. That’s quite an odd choice for a benchmark test.
The EMC solution takes up dramatically more rack space than the simple HP 2-u server solution, and involves dramatically more management complexity.
However, if you want automatic failover with minimal downtime and no data loss, local solid state storage probably isn’t going to cut it. It’d be relatively easy to add high availability in the form of Windows failover clustering to the EMC solution, but complex to build reliability into HP’s. (It’d require AlwaysOn Availability Groups or database mirroring, both of which would impact the workload speeds seen here.)
Cost is a tougher question – your mileage may vary given pricing discounts on gear like this, but note that HP’s solution uses four of these $28k USD cards. The solid state storage alone is $100k, which sounds like a lot, but remember that we’re talking about 24 cores of SQL Server licensing anyway – in the neighborhood of $165k just for the software.
Solid state changes the game for everything in databases, and you don’t have to buy the ultra-expensive cards, either. I’d love to see a reference architecture built with Intel’s new PCI Express drives, but since Intel hasn’t been involved in Microsoft Fast Track Data Warehouse Reference Architectures, that’s left as an exercise for the reader.
14 Comments. Leave new
Brent,
Tegile are the first company certified with with SQL 2014 and SQL 2012
We are also certified with actual storage array as opposed to Fusion IO cards (HP choice).
They 3PAR cannot produce the IOPS per $ we get to so they choose to use compromised in server solution.
I would love to show you what we have done that is different!
Peter – sure, email it to us. Thanks!
By the way… Tegile hardware is certified for 32 TB with max capacity at 103TB !!! With crappy old 16 core server… 😉
I can send you the certificate from MSFT.
Peter – sure, send us the certificate and the configuration docs and we’d be glad to check it out. Thanks!
Peter – I still haven’t received that certification and the specs.
Peter – I still haven’t received any Tegile specs. Certainly you weren’t just spamming our blog with comments to promote your company, were you?
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/data-warehouse-fast-track.aspx
Brent sorry, did not see you asking. I left my e-mail.
We have 45TB version with CISCO coming out soon too.
Was the Lenovo detail left out on purpose?
Paul – no, I just…couldn’t find the specs. (sigh) If you find ’em let me know though.
Haven’t read it yet, but why so apples to oranges?
Also, getting a 404 on link to James’ blog post…
Bill – thanks for the 404 heads-up, fixed.
When you say why apples to oranges – both vendors say that this is their recommended config for 28TB of data. That’s apples to apples. EMC is a storage vendor, so of course they chose to sell a lot of storage. HP is a server vendor, so of course it’s in their best interest to focus on what goes in the server.
Hi Brent, I actually read the EMC’s paper in detail and it made me so furious that I have decided to put my first blog review of that paper http://wportp.blogspot.co.uk/. EMC claims to host 28TB of data warehouse yet they test and give the figures on only a 1TB database that fits in their FAST Cache, in my view the figures will be very different if you ware to actually host a 28TB DW on it…. that you hope fits with their compression as the actual storage that you buy is 14TB not 28TB.
Regards,
Harris
Harris – hahaha, nicely done. You raise some great questions in there!
Found this one… http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp5156.pdf
2 x 18 cores 2.3GHz
20TB User capacity: ***Assumes 5:1 compression
4,959MB/Sec Physical Scan
7,021MB/Sec Logical Scan