Apache Cassandra performance advantages of the new Dell PowerEdge C6620 with Dell PERC 12 RAID controller
Read the ReportThu, 21 Sep 2023 23:14:16 -0000
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The PowerEdge C6620 with PERC 12 delivered lower latency and higher throughput than an HPE ProLiant XL170r Gen9 server with an HPE Smart Array P440ar controller
Overview
Today’s businesses both generate and take in enormous quantities of data as part of their daily operations. Smartphones, computers, servers, and the activities of people online are the sources of some of this data, but more and more of the data also come from a wide variety of other places, such as weather sensors, streaming video cameras, wearable devices, and onboard computers in vehicles, to name just a few examples. One estimate suggests that the number of connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices will reach over 29 billion by 2030.1 With an ever-increasing mountain of data, much of it from non-traditional sources, organizations need a way to extract value from the noise. NoSQL database systems such as Apache Cassandra can help organizations store, process, and analyze this data to glean useful insights. To be most effective, however, the database system should run on a high-performing computing platform that can complete big data workloads quickly and get insights into decision makers’ hands fast. We assessed the ability of two platforms to handle Cassandra workloads. The first was the new Dell™ PowerEdge™ C6620 with Broadcom®-based Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller (PERC) 12, which companies might choose if they’re upgrading to new servers to better handle their big data needs. The second was the older HPE ProLiant XL170r Gen9 server with an HPE Smart Array P440ar controller, which represents a server that organizations might already have in their data centers. The Dell and Broadcom solution provided higher throughput and lower latencies in our testing, meaning that it completed more big data work in the same amount of time as the older HPE solution. With a strong big data solution, businesses can put their data to work and use it to optimize processes, cut costs, improve customer experience, and grow their offerings. This report explores how and why running Apache Cassandra as a big data system on the Dell PowerEdge C6620 server with PERC 12 might be that solution for you.
About the Dell PowerEdge C6620 server Part of the Dell modular infrastructure PowerEdge C-Series, Dell says the PowerEdge C6620 is “designed for compute-intensive workloads” but also “ideal for IOPS-heavy workloads.”2 It features up to two 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, with up to 56 cores per processor; offers memory speeds of up to 4,800 MT/s; and supports up to 16 NVMe® drives for workload acceleration. Optional liquid cooling is also available.
To learn more about the Dell PowerEdge C6620, visit https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/ enterprise-products/c6620-two-socket-server-node-intel/spd/poweredge-c6620. |
Assessing Cassandra performance on the Dell PowerEdge C6620 with Broadcom-based PERC 12
Upgrading to new servers is a big decision. You know that newer, more modern technology is likely to offer performance improvements, but exactly what will those benefits look like, and how much more will the new systems be able to handle? Our testing quantifies the performance boost you might see on your Cassandra workloads by moving from HPE ProLiant XL170r Gen9 servers with Smart Array P440ar controllers to new Dell PowerEdge C6620 servers with Broadcom-based PERC 12.
Our configurations
For our test environment, we installed VMware® vSphere® 8 on both servers before configuring a separate infrastructure server with VMware ESXi™ and VMware vCenter®. We used this infrastructure server to manage the servers and to host client VMs that ran our test workload against our databases. The Dell PowerEdge C6620 server with PERC 12 used two Dell U2 Gen4 NVMe® 3.84TB drives. The HPE ProLiant XL170r Gen9 server with HPE Smart Array P440ar controller used six 960GB mixed-use SAS 12Gbps drives. Table 1 highlights more details of our configuration.
On each server, we created a Cassandra gold VM and cloned it five times to create a total of six VMs, which we joined in a cluster configuration. We then used the Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB) to create a 100GB database across the six VMs to take advantage of the distributed database functionality of Cassandra, ran YCSB workload B for 30 minutes, and recorded the results. In the results we highlight below, we provide two perspectives on the performance of each setup: the total throughput and the average read and write latency. Both results reflect the performance across all six VMs.
Why YCSB?
YCSB is an industry-standard benchmark for NoSQL databases. In 2010, a group from Yahoo! Research created it with “the goal of facilitating performance comparisons of the new generation of cloud data serving systems.”3 It is open source, meaning that anyone can access and modify the source code. In a recent interview, contributors to the YCSB open-source community note that it “is rather largely accepted by users” and “represents a series of scenarios that can be abstracted from the real world.”4 Apache Cassandra was one of the first four databases that the YCSB creators tested with the benchmark in 2010, and YCSB remains a good fit for testing Cassandra performance today.5
YCSB functions by letting users create a database populated with synthetic data on their database system of choice. Users can then run a pre-defined or customized workload against the database to gauge system performance. YCSB offers six core workloads, each of which represents a different type of database work. Our testing used the read-intensive workload B. This workload is 95 percent reads (pulling data from a database) and 5 percent writes (adding to or changing data in a database). YCSB gives one application example as photo tagging, where a user might occasionally add a tag to a photo (write) but will mostly search a library of tagged photos (read).6 A solution that offers higher performance on YCSB workload B is likely to improve performance on other read-intensive workloads, such as data analysis. We chose this workload to focus on reading and analyzing a database.
Upgrade to the Dell PowerEdge C6620 with Broadcom-based PERC 12 for lower latencies and better throughput
In our testing with YCSB, the Dell PowerEdge C6620 with PERC 12 offered better performance on all three metrics we measured: read latency, update (or write) latency, and throughput (measured in operations per second). The improvements were significant, meaning that trading out your HPE ProLiant XL170r Gen9 servers for new PowerEdge C6620 servers could enable your organization to handle substantially more Cassandra work. The first metrics we examined were read latency, which measures the delay between the application requesting a piece of data and the database system delivering it, and update latency, which measures the delay between the application changing or adding a piece of data and the database system completing the action. The Dell PowerEdge C6620 with PERC 12 was much faster on both types of latency, with the largest advantage on update latency. There, it offered 60.2 percent lower—or 1.97 milliseconds less—latency than the HPE ProLiant XL170r Gen9 server with Smart Array P440ar controller. It may seem like a sub-two-millisecond delay is inconsequential; if you were loading a webpage or pulling up a video, you wouldn’t notice a two-millisecond difference. The significance of this advantage, however, is due to the enormous number of operations that the database system must perform before it can deliver usable results. For this testing in YCSB, we set the max execution time variable (or how long the benchmark should run) to 30 minutes. At a rate of 249,210 operations per second (see Figure 3), the Dell PowerEdge C6620 with Broadcom-based PERC 12 executed over 400 million operations during the 30-minute test. So, while a difference of one or two milliseconds might not mean much on a single operation, on 400 million operations, the benefit of the faster solution becomes clear.
About the Dell PERC 12 RAID controllerThe Dell PowerEdge C6620 we tested features the PERC 12, which offers a single front controller with full RAID support for both NVMe and SAS.7 It brings 3,200MHz cache memory speed and a 16-lane host bus type and supports RAID levels 0, 1, 56, 10, 50, and 60.8
The Dell PERC 12 is based on the Broadcom SAS4116W series chip. According to Broadcom, “this eighth- generation SAS RAID-on-Chip (ROC) is based on the industry-leading Fusion-MPT architecture and features Tri-Mode SerDes technology that enables a seamless operation of up to 16-wide direct-connect NVMe, SAS or SATA storage devices from any system design.…The Tri-Mode ROC device with 16-wide PCIe Gen 4.0 lanes provides SAS data transfer rates of 22.5, 12, 6Gb/s per lane and 6Gb/s SATA data transfer rates per lane. The high-port count ROC helps eliminate storage bottlenecks with support of x8, x4, x2, and x1 PCI Express® lanes and complies with the PCIe 4.0 specification, offering up to 6 million IOPS (random reads) and up to 900,000 IOPS in RAID (random writes).”9 To learn more about the Dell PERC 12, visit https://infohub.delltechnologies.com/p/ dell-poweredge-raid-controller-12/. |
With these lower latencies, a solution will be quicker to handle interactions with the Cassandra database, which might include anything from pulling up X-ray images in a hospital to analyzing a large set of data on an ecommerce business’s customer preferences.
The Dell PowerEdge C6620 also offered an enormous advantage on throughput, delivering over twice the operations per second of the HPE ProLiant XL170r Gen9. Given the lower latencies we saw, this is unsurprising—because the PowerEdge C6620 could process operations faster (with lower latency), we would expect it to also be able to handle more operations in a given time. Depending on the read- intensive workloads you’re running, this increase in throughput could translate to quicker load times for your customers or faster data analysis, among other possibilities.
NoSQL databases and Cassandra in today’s business landscape
For this study, we tested with Apache Cassandra, a widely used NoSQL database system. NoSQL, or non-relational, databases are a category of database system that store and query data that do not have a traditional data structure. Traditional SQL databases organize data in a column-row format for finding or creating relationships across the data. To store data in a SQL database, all data in each table must have the same structure and fit a pre-defined schema, with every row in each table including the same columns and formats every time. NoSQL databases, however, can organize data more dynamically. They can deal with data from documents, graphs, key-values, and more. This flexibility lets people use them to analyze documents or data that don’t follow identical structuring formats. For organizations that need to store and analyze unstructured data—which may include data from Internet of Things (IoT) applications, audio, video, text files, social media posts, and more—a NoSQL database is a great option.
There are many types of NoSQL database systems; Apache Cassandra is a type of key-value and wide- column store. These databases have essentially two fields: One is the key, and the other is the value. The value can be any type of data (text, numbers, etc.). Taking our previous example, a key-value database could have some keys that correspond to a date, others that are numbers, and so on. A wide-column database, which Cassandra uses, is a two-dimensional key-value database, where instead of mapping to just one value, the keys can map to several columns of values.
Apache Cassandra is a distributed database, meaning that it can run on multiple nodes while acting as a single entity. This makes it resilient and highly scalable. Its scalability, combined with the flexibility afforded by its hybrid key-value/tabular model, allows it to handle many types of big data work very well. Cassandra is also open-source and free, a compelling benefit for organizations seeking to save on licensing fees.
The flexibility of Cassandra makes it suitable for a very large range of use cases. For example, Instagram uses Cassandra to support its content feed, Spotify uses it to store playlist metadata, and Intuit uses it as part of their largest production clusters supporting TurboTax.10,11,12 Common uses of Cassandra include:
- Analysis of customer data for personalization and recommendation, such as in ecommerce environments and content sharing or streaming websites
- Storage and analysis of IoT data, such as data gathered from mobile and wearable devices, environmental sensors, and edge devices
- Fraud detection, especially for financial organizations
- Messaging, such as for organizations’ internal messaging platforms
We chose to test with Cassandra in part because so many organizations rely on it for everyday operations. Approximately 90 percent of Fortune 100 companies use Apache Cassandra in some capacity.13 If your organization uses Cassandra or is considering doing so, to get the most value from it, you will want to ensure that the solution backing your implementation offers high performance. As our testing highlights, the Dell PowerEdge C6620 with Broadcom-based PERC 12 can deliver just that.
Dell PowerEdge servers: A proven history of strong Apache Cassandra performance In this study, we tested the Apache Cassandra performance of a new Dell PowerEdge C6620 server compared to an HPE ProLiant XL170r Gen9 server, but this isn’t the first time we’ve seen strong Cassandra performance on a latest-generation Dell server. In 2019, we tested Apache Cassandra performance on a 14th generation PowerEdge C-series server, the Dell EMC PowerEdge C6420. Pitted against an older modular solution of HPE ProLiant XL170r Gen9 server nodes, the PowerEdge C6420 accomplished double the amount of work in the same amount of rack space.14 Two years prior, in 2017, we assessed a different product line from the 14th generation of PowerEdge servers—the Dell EMC PowerEdge FC640 server—and found that it delivered dramatically more throughput and consistently lower latency than a legacy solution of PowerEdge R710 servers.15 |
Conclusion
Data proliferation today is rapid, and its growth shows no signs of stopping. For businesses that can take advantage of that data, there is tremendous potential value. One recent McKinsey study notes that “companies that are using data-driven B2B sales-growth engines report above-market growth and EBITDA increases in the range of 15 to 25 percent.”16 With data flooding in so quickly and in so many different forms, however, companies need high-performing big data solutions to have a chance at utilizing that data effectively.
We tested the performance of two platforms with a read-intensive Apache Cassandra database system big- data workload to assess which might be better suited to speedily deliver the insights decision makers need. Compared to an older HPE ProLiant XL170r Gen9 server with an HPE Smart Array P440ar controller, the new Dell PowerEdge C6620 with Broadcom-based PERC 12 RAID controller delivered faster read and update latencies and more than twice the throughput. This improvement in performance can help you glean more value from your unstructured data more quickly. If you’re watching your stores of unstructured data grow but are still leaning on older servers for your critical Cassandra workloads, it may be time for an upgrade.
- Lionel Sujay Vailshery, “Number of Internet of Things (IoT connected devices worldwide from 2019 to 2021, in forecasts from 2022 to 2030,” accessed July 13, 2023, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1183457/iot-connect- ed-devices-worldwide/.
- “PowerEdge C6620,” accessed June 23, 2023, https://www.delltechnologies.com/asset/en-us/products/servers/ technical-support/poweredge-c6620-spec-sheet.pdf.
- Brian F. Cooper, Adam Silberstein, Erwin Tam, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Russell Sears, “Benchmarking Cloud Serving Systems with YCSB,” accessed June 23, 2023, https://courses.cs.duke.edu/fall13/compsci590.4/838-CloudPa- pers/ycsb.pdf.
- “The Ultimate YCSB Benchmark Guide (2021),” accessed June 23, 2023, https://benchant.com/blog/ycsb.
- Brian F. Cooper, Adam Silberstein, Erwin Tam, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Russell Sears, “Benchmarking Cloud Serving Systems with YCSB,” accessed June 23, 2023, https://courses.cs.duke.edu/fall13/compsci590.4/838-CloudPa- pers/ycsb.pdf.
- “brianfrankcooper/YCSB,” accessed June 23, 2023, https://github.com/brianfrankcooper/YCSB/blob/master/doc/coreworkloads.html.
- “Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller 12 User’s Guide PERC H965i Adapter, PERC H965i Front, and PERC H965i MX,” accessed June 27, 2023, https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/perc-h965i-front/perc12/dell-tech- nologies-poweredge-raid-controller-12?guid=guid-5889415d-b297-43a0-9197-113a56c33c79&lang=en-us.
- “SAS4116W 24G SAS Tri-Mode RAID-on-Chip (ROC),” accessed June 27, 2023, https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/raid-on-chip/sas-4116w.
- “SAS4116W 24G SAS Tri-Mode RAID-on-Chip (ROC).”
- Instagram Engineering, “Open-sourcing a 10x reduction in Apache Cassandra tail latency,” accessed June 27, 2023, https://instagram-engineering.com/open-sourcing-a-10x-reduction-in-apache-cassandra-tail-latencyd- 64f86b43589.
- Kinshuk Mishra and Matt Brown, “Personalization at Spotify using Cassandra,” accessed June 27, 2023, https://engineering.atspotify.com/2015/01/personalization-at-spotify-using-cassandra/.
- Denson Pokta, “Pronto! Intuit Releases First Open Source Cassandra Cluster Manager,” accessed June 27, 2023, https://thenewstack.io/pronto-intuit-releases-first-open-source-cassandra-cluster-manager/.
- Jeff Carpenter, “How the world caught up with Apache Cassandra,” accessed June 27, 2023, https://techcrunch.com/sponsor/datastax/how-the-world-caught-up-with-apache-cassandra/.
- “Move your private cloud to Dell EMC PowerEdge C6420 server nodes and boost Apache Cassandra database analysis,” accessed June 23, 2023, https://www.principledtechnologies.com/Dell/Power-Edge-C6420-Apache- Cassandra-1019-v2.pdf.
- “Update your private cloud with 14th generation Dell EMC PowerEdge FC640 servers and do more work in less space,” accessed June 23, 2023, https://www.principledtechnologies.com/Dell/PowerEdge_FX2s_FC640_ Apache_Cassandra_1117.pdf.
- Jochen Böringer, Alexander Dierks, Isabel Huber, and Dennis Spillecke, “Insights to impact: Creating and sustain- ing data-driven commercial growth,” accessed July 13, 2023, https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growthmar- keting-and-sales/our-insights/insights-to-impact-creating-and-sustaining-data-driven-commercial-growth.
Related Documents
Speeding time to insight: The Dell PowerEdge C6620 with Dell PERC 12 RAID controller for Apache Cassandra big
Thu, 21 Sep 2023 22:56:22 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
The new PowerEdge C6620 delivered better performance—both higher throughput and lower latency—than a previous-generation PowerEdge C6520 with PERC 11
Overview
Every day, individuals and organizations generate massive quantities of data, from text messages to location data to information from sensors on factory floors and beyond. This rapid proliferation of data offers enormous opportunities: If businesses can extract insights from that data, they can use it to improve their operations, grow their customer base, and provide a better experience to those customers. That task is not simple, however. Much of this data is unstructured, meaning that it comes in many formats that traditional data models, such as SQL databases, cannot process. Processing and analyzing unstructured data may require different methods, such as utilizing a NoSQL database like Apache® Cassandra®. Organizations can use NoSQL databases to store, mine, and analyze unstructured data in its many forms and gain actionable information. To efficiently analyze such large quantities of data, however, they need a powerful computing solution running the database system. Investing in newer server solutions with updated processing, storage, and networking components can offer greater performance and enable companies to get to those vital insights faster. To highlight the advantages of moving from an older server solution to a new one for big data workloads, we tested Apache Cassandra performance on a new Dell™ PowerEdge™ C6620 with a Broadcom®-based Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller (PERC) 12 and an older Dell PowerEdge C6520 with Dell PERC 11. On multiple performance metrics, the newer Dell PowerEdge C6620 with PERC 12 delivered stronger performance than its predecessor, offering businesses the chance to increase the value of their data and realize its benefits more quickly.
About the Dell PowerEdge C6620 server
Part of the Dell modular infrastructure PowerEdge C-Series, Dell says the PowerEdge C6620 is “designed for compute-intensive workloads” but also “ideal for IOPS-heavy workloads.”1 It features up to two 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, with up to 56 cores per processor; offers memory speeds of up to 4,800 MT/s; and supports up to 16 NVMe® drives for workload acceleration. Optional liquid cooling is also available. visit https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/ enterprise-products/c6620-two-socket-server-node-intel/spd/poweredge-c6620.
Testing the Dell PowerEdge C6620 with Broadcom-based PERC 12
If you’re still relying on servers you purchased several years ago, it can be helpful to understand exactly how much you could gain by upgrading to a newer solution. We designed our testing to quantify the benefits of upgrading from older to latest-generation servers for organizations relying on Cassandra workloads for critical operations.
Our configurations
To set up our test environment, we installed VMware® vSphere® 8 on both servers. We then configured a separate infrastructure server with VMware ESXi™ and VMware vCenter® to manage the servers and to host client VMs that ran our test workload against our databases. The Dell PowerEdge C6620 server with Broadcom-based PERC 12 used two Dell U2 Gen4 NVMe® 3.84TB drives, while the Dell PowerEdge C6520 server with PERC 11 used six 960GB mixed-use SAS 12Gbps SFF drives. (See Table 1 for more details of our configuration.)
Table 1: System configurations we used in our testing. Source: Principled Technologies.
Server configuration information | Dell PowerEdge C6520 | Dell PowerEdge C6620 |
Processors | 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6330 28 cores, 2GHz | 2x Intel Xeon Platinum 8452Y 36 cores, 2GHz |
Storage controller | PERC H750 Adapter, 8GB cache | PERC H965i Adapter, 8GB cache |
Disks | 6x 960GB Toshiba PX05SVB096Y (12Gb SAS SSDs) | 2x 3.84TB Dell Enterprise NVMe v2 AGN RI U.2 (NVMe SSDs) |
Total memory in system (GB) | 512 | |
OS and version number | VMware ESXi 8.0.0, 20513097 |
On each server, we created a Cassandra gold VM and cloned it five times to create a total of six VMs, which we joined in a cluster configuration. We then used the Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB) to create a 100GB database across the six VMs to take advantage of the distributed database functionality of Cassandra, ran YCSB workload B for 30 minutes, and recorded the results. In the results we highlight below, we provide two perspectives on the performance of each setup: the total throughput and the average read and write latency. Both results reflect the performance across all six VMs.
Why YCSB?
YCSB is an industry-standard benchmark for NoSQL databases. In 2010, a group from Yahoo! Research created it with “the goal of facilitating performance comparisons of the new generation of cloud data serving systems.”2 It is open source, meaning that anyone can access and modify the source code. In a recent interview, contributors to the YCSB open-source community note that it “is rather largely accepted by users” and “represents a series of scenarios that can be abstracted from the real world.”3 Apache Cassandra was one of the first four databases that the YCSB creators tested with the benchmark in 2010, and YCSB remains a good fit for testing Cassandra performance today.4
YCSB functions by letting users create a database populated with synthetic data on their database system of choice. Users can then run a pre-defined or customized workload against the database to gauge system performance. YCSB offers six core workloads, each of which represents a different type of database work. Our testing used the read-intensive workload B. This workload is 95 percent reads (pulling data from a database) and 5 percent writes (adding to or changing data in a database). YCSB gives one application example as photo tagging, where a user might occasionally add a tag to a photo, (write) but will mostly search a library of tagged photos (read).5 A solution that offers higher performance on YCSB workload B is likely to improve performance on other read-intensive workloads, such as data analysis. We chose this workload to focus on reading and analyzing a database.
See higher throughput and lower latency with the Dell PowerEdge C6620 with Broadcom-based PERC 12
Our testing with YCSB yielded three metrics: read latency, update (or write) latency, and throughput (measured in operations per second). The Dell PowerEdge C6620 with Broadcom-based PERC 12 offered stronger performance than the PowerEdge C6520 with PERC 11 on all three metrics, indicating that an upgrade can help speed your Cassandra workloads.
On the first and second metrics, read latency and update latency, the Dell PowerEdge C6620 was significantly faster than its previous-generation counterpart. Read latency measures the delay between the application requesting a piece of data and the database system delivering it; update latency measures the delay between the application changing or adding a piece of data and the database system completing the action. The shorter these delays, the faster a solution will be at completing user-facing requests, such as retrieving a customer’s buying history when a store manager searches for it, and larger workloads, such as running analysis on a set of tens of thousands of data points.
On the surface, the differences in latency between the two solutions are very small: 0.49 milliseconds for read latency and 0.57 milliseconds for update latency. On a single operation, a delay of less than a millisecond would be impossible for a human to notice. But the database system isn’t handling just one operation—it’s handling thousands or millions of operations all at once. Our YCSB testing, for example, set the maxexecutiontime variable (or how long the benchmark should run) to 30 minutes. This means that at the Dell PowerEdge C6620 server’s rate of 249,210 operations per second (which we show in Figure 3), it executed over 400 million operations during the 30-minute test. As tiny differences in latency scales up, they become very significant indeed. And the shorter these delays, the faster a solution will be at completing both user-facing requests, such as retrieving a customer’s buying history when a store manager searches for it, and larger workloads, such as running analysis on a set of tens of thousands of data points.
About the Dell PERC 12 RAID controllerThe Dell PowerEdge C6620 we tested features the PERC 12, which offers a single front controller with full RAID support for both NVMe and SAS.6 It brings 3,200MHz cache memory speed and a 16-lane host bus type and supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, and 60.7
The Dell PERC 12 is based on the Broadcom SAS4116W series chip. According to Broadcom, “this eighth- generation SAS RAID-on-Chip (ROC) is based on the industry-leading Fusion-MPT architecture and features Tri-Mode SerDes technology that enables a seamless operation of up to 16-wide direct-connect NVMe, SAS or SATA storage devices from any system design.…The Tri-Mode ROC device with 16-wide PCIe Gen 4.0 lanes provides SAS data transfer rates of 22.5, 12, 6Gb/s per lane and 6Gb/s SATA data transfer rates per lane. The high-port count ROC helps eliminate storage bottlenecks with support of x8, x4, x2, and x1 PCI Express® lanes and complies with the PCIe 4.0 specification, offering up to 6 million IOPS (random reads) and up to 900,000 IOPS in RAID (random writes).”8 To learn more about the Dell PERC 12, visit https://infohub.delltechnologies.com/p/ dell-poweredge-raid-controller-12/ |
On the third metric, throughput, the Dell PowerEdge C6620 delivered 1.25 times as many operations per second as the previous-generation PowerEdge C6520. This increase in throughput is what we would expect to see based on the lower latencies: If a system is able to process operations faster (i.e., with lower latency), it will also boost how many operations the system can handle in a given time (i.e., better throughput). With greater throughput, depending on what read-intensive workloads your organization is running, you might see faster video streaming, quicker recommendations for customers, or an increase in the speed of users pulling up data.
NoSQL databases and Cassandra in today’s business landscape
For this study, we tested with Apache Cassandra, a widely used NoSQL database system. NoSQL, or non-relational, databases are a category of database system that store and query data that do not have a traditional data structure. Traditional SQL databases organize data in a column-row format for finding or creating relationships across the data. To store data in a SQL database, all data in each table must have the same structure and fit a pre-defined schema, with every row in each table including the same columns and formats every time. NoSQL databases, however, can organize data more dynamically. They can deal with data from documents, graphs, key-values, and more. This flexibility lets people use them to analyze documents or data that don’t follow identical structuring formats. For organizations that need to store and analyze unstructured data—which may include data from Internet of Things (IoT) applications, audio, video, text files, social media posts, and more—a NoSQL database is a great option.
There are many types of NoSQL database systems; Apache Cassandra is a type of key-value and wide- column store. These databases have essentially two fields: One is the key, and the other is the value. The value can be any type of data (text, numbers, etc.). Taking our previous example, a key-value database could have some keys that correspond to a date, others that are numbers, and so on. A wide-column database, which Cassandra uses, is a two-dimensional key-value database, where instead of mapping to just one value, the keys can map to several columns of values.
Apache Cassandra is a distributed database, meaning that it can run on multiple nodes while acting as a single entity. This makes it resilient and highly scalable. Its scalability, combined with the flexibility afforded by its hybrid key-value/tabular model, allows it to handle many types of big data work very well. Cassandra is also open-source and free, a compelling benefit for organizations seeking to save on licensing fees.
The flexibility of Cassandra makes it suitable for a very large range of use cases. For example, Instagram uses Cassandra to support its content feed, Spotify uses it to store playlist metadata, and Intuit uses it as part of their largest production clusters supporting TurboTax.9,10,11 Common uses of Cassandra include:
- Analysis of customer data for personalization and recommendation, such as in ecommerce environments and content sharing or streaming websites
- Storage and analysis of IoT data, such as data gathered from mobile and wearable devices, environmental sensors, and edge devices
- Fraud detection, especially for financial organizations
- Messaging, such as for organizations’ internal messaging platforms
We chose to test with Cassandra in part because so many organizations rely on it for everyday operations. Approximately 90 percent of Fortune 100 companies use Apache Cassandra in some capacity.12 If your organization uses Cassandra or is considering doing so, to get the most value from it, you will want to ensure that the solution backing your implementation offers high performance. As our testing highlights, the Dell PowerEdge C6620 with Broadcom-based PERC 12 can deliver just that.
Dell PowerEdge servers: A proven history of strong Apache Cassandra performance In this study, we tested the Apache Cassandra performance of a new Dell PowerEdge C6620 server compared to an HPE ProLiant XL170r Gen9 server, but this isn’t the first time we’ve seen strong Cassandra performance on a latest-generation Dell server. In 2019, we tested Apache Cassandra performance on a 14th generation PowerEdge C-series server, the Dell EMC PowerEdge C6420. Pitted against an older modular solution of HPE ProLiant XL170r Gen9 server nodes, the PowerEdge C6420 accomplished double the amount of work in the same amount of rack space.13 Two years prior, in 2017, we assessed a different product line from the 14th generation of PowerEdge servers—the Dell EMC PowerEdge FC640 server—and found that it delivered dramatically more throughput and consistently lower latency than a legacy solution of PowerEdge R710 servers.14 |
Conclusion
The vast amounts of unstructured data that people and organizations generate daily have the potential to bring incredible value to companies that can utilize it quickly and correctly. Buried in the data are insights about consumer preferences, product performance, environmental trends, and more—but to access those insights at the speed of business, you need high-performing NoSQL databases. Aging servers may be holding you back from the full value of your data.
We found that the new Dell PowerEdge C6620 with Broadcom-based PERC 12 RAID controller can speed read-intensive Apache Cassandra database workloads compared to an older server solution. Faster read and update latencies and higher throughput, as we saw the PowerEdge C6620 deliver, can speed the retrieval, processing, and analysis of your unstructured data, enabling you to more effectively extract its value. To more fully utilize your data to inform your everyday business operations, consider the Dell PowerEdge C6620 with Broadcom-based PERC 12 RAID controller.
- “PowerEdge C6620,” accessed June 23, 2023, https://www.delltechnologies.com/asset/en-us/products/servers/ technical-support/poweredge-c6620-spec-sheet.pdf.
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- Brian F. Cooper, Adam Silberstein, Erwin Tam, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Russell Sears, “Benchmarking Cloud Serving Systems with YCSB,” accessed June 23, 2023, https://courses.cs.duke.edu/fall13/compsci590.4/838-CloudPa- pers/ycsb.pdf.
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- “SAS4116W 24G SAS Tri-Mode RAID-on-Chip (ROC).”
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- Kinshuk Mishra and Matt Brown, “Personalization at Spotify using Cassandra,” accessed June 27, 2023, https://engineering.atspotify.com/2015/01/personalization-at-spotify-using-cassandra/.
- Denson Pokta, “Pronto! Intuit Releases First Open Source Cassandra Cluster Manager,” accessed June 27, 2023, https://thenewstack.io/pronto-intuit-releases-first-open-source-cassandra-cluster-manager/.
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- “Move your private cloud to Dell EMC PowerEdge C6420 server nodes and boost Apache Cassandra database analysis,” accessed June 23, 2023, https://www.principledtechnologies.com/Dell/Power-Edge-C6420-Apache- Cassandra-1019-v2.pdf.
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Improve performance by easily migrating to a modern OpenShift environment on PowerEdge R7615 servers
Tue, 14 May 2024 20:15:19 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
Improve performance and gain room to grow by easily migrating to a modern OpenShift environment on Dell PowerEdge R7615 servers with 4th Generation AMD EPYC processors and high-speed 100GbE Broadcom NICs
We deployed this modern environment, then migrated database VMs from legacy servers and saw performance improvements that support consolidation.
Transactional databases are the backbone of many business operations, powering ecommerce and order fulfillment, human resources and payroll, and a host of other activities. If your company is running these kinds of workloads on server infrastructure that is several years old, you might believe that performance is adequate and that you have little reason to consider upgrading to new servers with modern processors, networking, and a Red Hat® OpenShift® container-based environment. In fact, by continuing to use this older gear, you could be incurring higher than necessary operating expenditures by maintaining and powering more servers than you need to perform a given volume of work. You could also be risking downtime with aging hardware that is likelier to break down. By upgrading to a modern environment, you could mitigate these issues and future-proof your infrastructure. A 2019 Forrester Consulting report recommended that organizations refresh their servers at least every three years to maximize agility and productivity.[1] The report states not only that modern servers allow organizations to adopt more emerging technologies at a faster rate, but also “modern hardware has a profound impact on business benefits such as better customer experience, employee productivity, and innovation.”[2]
We explored the process of migrating VMs from a legacy environment and conducted testing to quantify the resulting improvements in network and database performance. We started with a legacy environment consisting of MySQL™ virtual machines (VMs) running on a cluster of three Dell™ PowerEdge™ R7515 servers with 3rd Generation AMD EPYC™ processors and 25Gb Broadcom® NICs. We then deployed a modern OpenShift container-based environment comprising three Dell PowerEdge R7615 servers with 4th Generation AMD EPYC processors and high-speed 100Gb Broadcom NICs. While the primary application of OpenShift is typically for containerized workloads, we used OpenShift Virtualization, which presents a familiar VM layer to administrators while utilizing the containerized technology on the underlying layer. Both environments used a Dell PowerStore 1200T for external storage that the servers accessed using iSCSI. We measured database performance using the HammerDB TPROC-C benchmark.
We found that the modern cluster environment of Dell PowerEdge R7615 servers with 4th Generation AMD EPYC processors and high-speed 100Gb Broadcom NICs outperformed the legacy cluster environment, delivering 44 percent greater database performance. These improvements mean that companies that upgrade can enjoy savings by meeting their workload requirements with fewer servers to license, maintain, power, and cool. Selecting 100Gb Broadcom NICs also positions companies well to take advantage of increasingly popular network-intensive technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI).
The benefits of containerization and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization
Many organizations choose containers for DevOps due to their easy scalability and portability. Because a container encapsulates an application as well as everything necessary to run that application, it’s simple to move the container from development to test and production environments, adding instances of the application by replicating the container. Containers can also be useful for microservices, data streaming, and other use cases.[3]
Containers aren’t necessarily ideal for every use case, however, and for some infrastructures, IT teams may wish to incorporate both containers and VMs. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, which we used in our testing, enables organizations to run both VMs and containers on the same platform by bringing VMs into containers.[4] This lets IT reap the benefits of both containers and VMs with the efficiency benefit of relying on one management tool, rather than having to maintain two distinct infrastructures.
About our testing
We explored the process of deploying a modern data center environment and migrating VMs to it from a legacy environment. We also measured the database performance the VMs achieved in both environments:
Legacy environment
- Three Dell PowerEdge R7515 servers with 3rd Generation AMD EPYC 7663 56-core processors and Broadcom Advanced Dual 25Gb Ethernet NICs
- External storage using Dell PowerStore 1200T over iSCSI
- VMware® vSphere® 8
Modern environment
- Three Dell PowerEdge R7615 servers with 4th Generation AMD EPYC 9554 64-core processors and Broadcom NetExtreme-E BCM57508 100GB NICs
- External storage using Dell PowerStore 1200T over iSCSI
- Red Hat OpenShift 4.14
Figure 1 presents a diagram of our test configuration. In addition to our test server clusters, we needed three servers to host infrastructure VMs, workload client VMs, and the OpenShift control node VMs. We configured a Dell PowerEdge R7525 to serve as the host for our infrastructure VMs for services such as AD, DHCP, and DNS, as well as HammerDB client VMs. We also configured a Dell PowerEdge R7625 to host additional HammerDB client VMs. For the OpenShift environment, we deployed a Dell PowerEdge R540 to host the OCP control nodes. We virtualized the control nodes to reduce the number of servers needed for the test bed.
Figure 1: Our test configuration. Source: Principled Technologies.
To test the MySQL database performance of each environment, we used the TPROC-C workload from the HammerDB benchmark. HammerDB developers derived their OLTP workload from the TPC-C benchmark specifications; however, as this is not a full implementation of the official TPC-C standards, the results in this paper are not directly comparable to published TPC-C results. For more information, please visit https://www.hammerdb.com/docs/ch03s01.html.
Each VM had a single MySQL instance with a TPROC-C database. We targeted the maximum transactions per minute (TPM) each environment could achieve by increasing the user count until performance degraded.
What we learned
Finding 1: Deploying OpenShift in the modern environment was easy
For our environment, the OpenShift installation process using the Red Hat Assisted Installer to install an OpenShift Installer-Provisioned Cluster was straightforward and simple. We started by setting up the prerequisites for the environment, which included a VM for Active Directory, DNS, and DHCP. We created a domain for our private network and added the API and ingress routes as DNS A records. Next, we set up a VM as a router so that our OpenShift environment could access the internet from our private network. Finally, we created three blank VMs to serve as our OpenShift controller nodes. Once we had met the pre-requisite requirements, we logged into the Red Hat Hybrid Console and navigated to the Assisted Installer to create the cluster.
The Assisted Installer streamlined the process by walking us through configuration menus for storage, network, and access to the cluster. We started the cluster creation by assigning it a name, providing the domain, and selecting an OpenShift version. From there the installer guided us through the process of providing an installer image using the SSH public key of the server running the installer. After downloading the ISO, we booted each of the controller and worker nodes into the image and the Assisted Installer discovered each node. After discovering the controller and worker nodes, the installer walked us through the rest of the configuration process and then began the installation. The Assisted Installer made the process very simple with only six configuration tabs to advance through, and with our total install time after configuration taking around three hours. Once the installation was complete, each node rebooted into the OpenShift OS and the Assisted Installer provided us with a cluster console fully qualified domain name (FQDN) to connect to and manage the cluster from. For detailed steps on the OpenShift deployment process, see the science behind the report.
Finding 2: Migrating VMs from the legacy VMware environment to the modern OpenShift environment was easy
Migrating a VM from the VMware environment to OpenShift was also a straightforward process and quick to set up. While the actual migration time will vary depending on VM size and hardware speed, the setup consists of only a few steps and took us less than 10 minutes. We first installed the Migration Toolkit for Virtualization from the OpenShift OperatorHub. We then entered the IP address and credentials for the vCenter as a new provider. Next, we created a NetworkMap and a StorageMap to connect the respective resources between the environments. We then created a new migration plan to map the VMs to a namespace in OCP. We ran the migration plan on a single VM, and confirmed that we were able to enter the VM console once the migration was complete. For detailed steps on the process of migrating VMs from the legacy environment to the modern environment, see the science behind the report.
About 4th Gen AMD EPYC 9554 processors
According to AMD, EPYC 9554 processors deliver fast performance “for cloud, enterprise, and HPC workloads—helping accelerate your business.”[5] EPYC processors include AMD Infinity Guard, which per AMD is “a set of layered, cutting-edge security features that help you protect sensitive data and avoid the costly downtime cause by security breaches.”[6]
In addition to performance and security features, AMD claims their processors are energy-efficient, which can reduce energy costs and “minimize environmental impacts from data center operations while advancing your company’s sustainability objectives.”[7]
When comparing SPECCPU Floating Point peak rates and the default thermal design power (TDP) of the AMD EPYC 9554 and the AMD EPYC 7663, the 9554 has 54 percent better performance per watt, which demonstrates the improved power efficiency with the new 4th Gen AMD EPYC process.[8],[9]
For more information about 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors visit: https://www.amd.com/en/processors/epyc-server-cpu-family.
Finding 3: Database performance improved by 44 percent in the new environment
Figure 2 shows the results of our database performance testing using the TPROC-C workload from the HammerDB benchmark suite. The modern OpenShift cluster of Dell PowerEdge R7615 servers outperformed the legacy cluster by 44 percent. This extra capability could benefit companies upgrading to the new environment in several ways. The company could provide a better user experience, perform more work—or support more users—with a given number of servers, or reduce the number of servers necessary to execute a given workload.
Figure 2: Performance in transactions per minute using the TPROC-C workload of the HammerDB benchmark suite. Higher is better. Source: Principled Technologies.
Finding 4: Performance improved in the modern cluster, supporting consolidation, which leads to savings
Based on the results of our performance tests (see Figure 3), a company could consolidate the database workloads of a four-node Dell PowerEdge 7515 cluster with some additional headroom into three modern Dell PowerEdge R7615 servers with 4th Generation AMD EPYC processors and high-speed 100Gb Broadcom NICs.
The cluster of three modern servers delivered a total of 9,674,180 transactions per minute (3,224,726 TPMs per server). The cluster of three legacy servers delivered a total of 6,714,712 TPM (2,238,237 per server). Based on these results, four legacy servers would achieve a total of 8,952,948 TPM, which would leave 721,231 additional TPM room for growth on the modern three-node cluster.
Reducing the number of servers you need means that operational expenditures such as data center power and cooling and administrator time for maintenance also decrease, leading to ongoing savings.
Figure 3: Performance in transactions per minute that three modern servers and four legacy servers could achieve, based on our hands-on testing. Higher is better. Source: Principled Technologies.
About Dell PowerEdge R7615 servers
The Dell PowerEdge R7615 is a 2U, single-socket rack server. Dell states that it has designed this server to provide “performance and flexible, low-latency storage options in an air or Direct Liquid Cooling (DLC) configuration.”[10]
According to Dell, this server uses the AMD EPYC 4th generation processor to deliver up to 50 percent higher core count per single-socket platform in an innovative air-cooled chassis.[11] It also supports DDR5 at 4800 MT/s memory and PCIe® Gen5 with double the speed of previous Gen4 for faster access and transport of data, optimizing application output.[12] It supports up to six single-wide full-length GPUs or three double-wide full-length GPUs, to improve responsiveness or reduce app load time for power users, plus lower-latency, high-performance NVMe SSDs to help maximize compute performance.[13]
Learn more at https://www.delltechnologies.com/asset/en-us/products/servers/technicalsupport/poweredge-r7615-spec-sheet.pdf.
How high-speed 100Gb Broadcom NICs can help your organization
Even if a 25Gb NIC is sufficient to meet a company’s current networking needs, opting to equip new servers with the high-speed 100Gb Broadcom NIC can be a smart move. Future-proofing your network can allow you to meet the increasing demands of emerging technologies.
Advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, which can require the processing and transmission of large amounts of data, are becoming increasingly prevalent across businesses of all sizes. In a June 2023 survey of small business decision-makers, 74 percent were interested in using AI or automation in their business and 55 percent said their interest in these technologies had grown in the first half of 2023.[14] Upgrading to a modern environment with a highspeed 100Gb Broadcom NIC positions companies to take advantage of AI applications for social media, content creation, marketing, customer support, and many other use cases.
Another way that investing in the high-speed 100Gb Broadcom NIC can help your company is through improved efficiency. You might be tempted to go with a 25Gb NIC, thinking that as your networking needs increase, you can simply add more NICs of this size. However, consider a 2023 Principled Technologies study that compared the performance of a server solution with a 100Gb Broadcom 57508 NIC and a solution with four 25Gb NICs.[15] Testing revealed that the 100Gb NIC solution achieved up to 2.3 times the throughput of the solution with 25Gb NICs. It also delivered greater bandwidth consistency, which can translate to providing a better user experience; the report states that applications using the 25Gb NICs network configuration “would experience significant variation in available bandwidth, potentially causing jittery or interrupted service to multiple streams.”[16]
About the Broadcom BCM57508-P2100G Dual-Port 100GbE PCle 4.0 ethernet controller
A higher performing NIC can reduce latency, increase throughput, and allow the server to transmit and receive a great volume of data. The Dell PowerEdge R7615 we tested features the Broadcom BCM57508-P2100G DualPort 100GbE PCle 4.0 ethernet controller, which supports speeds of up to 200 Gigabits per second. Broadcom designed the BCM57508-P2100G “to build highlyscalable, feature-rich networking solutions in servers for enterprise and cloud-scale networking and storage applications, including high-performance computing, telco, machine learning, storage disaggregation, and data analytics.”[17]
The BCM57508-P2100G features BroadSAFE® technology, “to provide unparalleled platform security” and a “unique set of highly-optimized hardware acceleration engines to enhance network performance and improve server efficiency.”[18]
BCM57508-P2100G Dual-Port 100GbE PCle 4.0 ethernet controller. Image provided by Dell.
Conclusion
If your organization’s transactional databases are running on gear that is several years old, you have much to gain by upgrading to modern servers with new processors and networking components and an OpenShift environment. In our testing, a modern OpenShift environment with a cluster of three Dell PowerEdge R7615 servers with 4th Generation AMD EPYC processors and high-speed 100Gb Broadcom NICs outperformed a legacy environment with MySQL VMs running on a cluster of three Dell PowerEdge R7515 servers with 3rd Generation AMD EPYC processors and 25Gb Broadcom NICs. We also easily migrated a VM from the legacy environment to the modern environment, with only a few steps required to set up and less than ten minutes of hands-on time. The performance advantage of the modern servers would allow a company to reduce the number of servers necessary to perform a given amount of database work, thus lowering operational expenditures such as power and cooling and IT staff time for maintenance. The high-speed 100Gb Broadcom NICs in this solution also give companies better network performance and networking capacity to grow as they embrace emerging technologies such as AI that put great demands on networks.
This project was commissioned by Dell Technologies.
May 2024
Principled Technologies is a registered trademark of Principled Technologies, Inc.
All other product names are the trademarks of their respective owners.
Read the report on the PT site at https://facts.pt/2V6p3FG and see the science at https://facts.pt/Dj53ZJb.
Author: Principled Technologies
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[2] Forrester, “Why Faster Refresh Cycles and Modern Infrastructure Management are Critical to Business Success,” accessed May 1, 2024, www.techrepublic.com/resource-library/casestudies/forrester-why-faster-refresh-cycles-and-modern-infrastructure-management-are-critical-to-business-success/.
[3] Red Hat, “Understanding containers,” accessed April 12, 2024, https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/containers.
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https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift/virtualization.
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[6] AMD, “AMD EPYC Processors.”
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[9] SPEC, “SPEC CPU®2017 Floating Point Rate Result for Dell PowerEdge R6515 (AMD EPYC 7663 56-Core Processor),” accessed May 2, 2024, https://www.spec.org/cpu2017/results/res2021q3/cpu2017-20210913-29288.html.
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[11] Dell, “PowerEdge R7615 Specification Sheet.”
[12] Dell, “PowerEdge R7615 Specification Sheet.”
[13] Dell, “PowerEdge R7615 Specification Sheet.”
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Dell PowerEdge R750 servers for improved networking performance,” accessed April 12, 2024,
https://www.principledtechnologies.com/Dell/PowerEdge-R750-networking-iPerf-1023.pdf.
[16] Principled Technologies, “Opt for modern 100Gb Broadcom 57508 NICs in your
Dell PowerEdge R750 servers for improved networking performance,” accessed April 12, 2024,
https://www.principledtechnologies.com/Dell/PowerEdge-R750-networking-iPerf-1023.pdf.
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https://www.broadcom.com/products/ethernet-connectivity/network-adapters/bcm57508-200g-ic.
[18] Broadcom, “BCM57508 – 200GbE.”