Live Optics is Your Friend
Tue, 05 Oct 2021 19:01:57 -0000
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It’s a rare day that a free tool exists that can help profile customer workloads to the mutual benefit of all. Live Optics (previously DPack) is a gem in the rough that is truly a win-win proposition for customers and vendors such as Dell. I’ve been using it for years and found that it’s a rare day that I don’t learn something of use.
The tool is similar to SAR on steroids. Data is collected for each host. Hosts can be VMs. Servers can be from any manufacturer. The data collected is on IOPS (size and amount), memory usage, CPU usage and network activity. It can be run in local mode where the data doesn’t go anywhere else or it can be stored in a Dell private cloud. The later is more beneficial as it may be accessed by folks in many roles for various assessments. The data may also be mined to help Dell make better decisions of current and future products based on actual observed user profiles.
I use LiveOptics to profile database workloads like Greenplum and Vertica, Hadoop, NoSQL databases like MongoDB, Cassandra, Marklogic and more.
Upon inspection of the workload the data collected helps facilitate more meaningful discussions with various SMEs and to right size future designs. In one case I found a customer that was using less than half their memory during peak periods…so we suggested new server BOMs with much less memory as they didn’t need what they had.
Can we help you with assessing your workloads of interest on our servers or those of our competitors?
Some links of interest
- https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-us/live-optics/index.htm#pdf-overlay=//www.delltechnologies.com/asset/en-us/solutions/business-solutions/briefs-summaries/cloud-live-optics-data-for-it-decisions-ebrochure.pdf
- https://www.liveoptics.com/
- https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/understand-your-it-environment-with-dell-live-optics/
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How about SingleStore for your database on 15G Dell PE Servers?
Fri, 02 Dec 2022 04:58:29 -0000
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How about SingleStore for your database on 15G Dell PE Servers?
Singlestore is a distributed relational database that was previously called MemSQL. It is well suited to analytics workloads. There are two data structure constructs available. First is the column store which is on disk. Disk is typically SSDs. Second is a row store that is in memory and essentially a key-value database. Yes you can have both types in the same db and join across the two different table types. Data for the column store is arranged in leaves where the low level detail is stored and aggregators which are summarized data structures. Clients use the aggregators for queries via SQL.
Singlestore uses the MySQL protocol which makes it compatible with anything that can connect to MySQL.
Customers choose this database when they have demanding high performance analytics needs. We have many large financial customers that are very happy with it.
So what does it look like with the latest 15G IceLake servers for Dell.
Although it could run on most any server the leading candidate would be a Dell PowerEdge R650 for db sizes up to 400TBu. Environments that have larger db needs would use a Dell PowerEdge R750.
ROTs
- Aggregators use single 25GbE NIC
- Leaf nodes use a single 10GbE NIC
- Aggregator nodes use about ¼ RAM & ¼ cores as leaf nodes
Other items
- RAID is optional but most customers elect it. The figures below assume RAID10.
- Use an m.2 BOSS card w/ a R1 pair of 480GB RI SSDs for the OS and software. They are now hot swappable.
- As for durability & cost reasons 99.99% of the time read intensive value SAS SSDs will be the right fit.
5TB Env
- 2 aggregators w/ 4 x 480GB RI SSD, 128GB RAM, 2 x 8c, 25GbE NIC
- 4 leaf nodes w/ 4 x 960GB RI SSD, 256GB RAM, 2 x 12c, 10GbE NIC
100TB Env
- 3 aggregators w/ 2 x 960GB RI SSD, 128GB RAM, 2 x 8c, 25GbE NIC
- 7 leaf nodes w/ 8 x 3.84TB RI SSD, 512GB RAM, 2 x 24c, 10GbE NIC
400TB Env
- 4 aggregators w/ 2 x 960GB RI SSD, 128GB RAM, 2 x 8c, 25GbE NIC
- 14 leaf nodes w/ 8 x 7.68TB RI SSD, 1024GB RAM, 2 x 28c, 10GbE NIC
If you need your Singlestore database on Dell PE Servers do let us know.
Kinetica Can Give You Accelerated Analytics
Wed, 02 Jun 2021 22:01:28 -0000
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Accelerate Those Analytics With a GPGPU Database
First you might ask what a GPU database actually is. In a nutshell it's typically a relational database that can offload certain operations to a GPU so that queries run faster. There are three players in the space including Kinetica, Sqream and OmniSci. By all measures Kinetica is the leader which is one of the key reasons we've chosen to partner with them through our OEM channel.
The first thing one might ask is what kinds of things can a GPGPU Database do for me. Some ideas for your consideration might be:
- Legacy RDBMS workloads from Oracle, DB2, Teradata, Sybase or SQL Server in an accelerated fashion with lower latency, better performance and greater throughput.
- Conduct location analytics on networks or geolocation data.
- Fraud detection
One of the coolest things I've found to date with Kinetica is that it only runs queries on the GPU where it can be accelerated. Essentially joins, computations and math operations. Queries involving a string search would be run on the CPUs. In this matter collectively the entire workload can be accelerated.
These databases run on servers with direct attach storage capable of running NVidia GPUs. In the Dell 14G product family the most common servers are R740, R740XD and R940XA servers. For 15G the most appealing are R750, R750XA and XE8545 servers. Other models are certainly possible but less common. For purposes of this article we will focus on the R750XA. This brand new server is based on Ice Lake processors and sports two sockets with up to 40 cores per socket for a maximal possible number of cores per server of 80. A pair of top end A100 GPUs can configured with an NVLink bridge to enable interlinks of 600GB/s. Systems can be configured with up to 6TB of memory including the latest 200 series optane modules. Local storage is most common and this server can house up to eight 2.5" drives which can be either NVMe or SSD. I know you're thinking what if my database can't fit on a single server. Luckily the answer is simply to use more servers. Kinetica can shard the db across n nodes.
If you want to learn more about Kinetica on Dell PE servers drop me a line at Mike.King2@Dell.com