Johannesburg, 28 Aug 1998
Hewlett-Packard and Red Brick have announced their strongest benchmark results ever in a proof-of-performance and scalability (POPS) test.
In a benchmark designed to simulate a real-world retail environment, Red Brick Warehouse 5.1 and an HP 9000 V2200 Enterprise Server running the HP-UX(1) 11 operating environment successfully loaded, queried and scaled a data warehouse to more than 1 Terabyte (TB) of raw data with 600 concurrent users.
"Information is the most precious resource a business has," says Janice Chaffin, general manager of HP`s High Performance Systems Division. "That`s why we`re so focused on developing solutions that enable our customers to access, understand and use their information as a competitive differentiator. Red Brick is a leader in business-critical data warehousing, and HP`s position as the most popular and scalable Red Brick platform provides customers with an IT solution that helps them maximize the value of their business information."
POPS benchmark details:
The POPS benchmark test was built on these three criteria:
- Ability to load more than a TB of data in an acceptable timeframe;
- Consistently superior query performance against a TB-sized data warehouse; and
- Scalability of a very large number of concurrent users against the TB-sized warehouse.
The benchmark was constructed to provide a realistic retail environment that included 63 grocery stores, more than 19 000 products, roughly 12m transactions per day and 35 ongoing sales promotions. The data warehouse included two fact tables (daily forecasts and daily sales) and five dimension tables (customer, period, product, promotion and store).
Loading data into a data warehouse is one of the most critical success factors for any data warehouse. Loading consists of data cleansing, index building, referential integrity checking and aggregation updating. Using one administrator, the Red Brick and HP solution was able to load more than 1 TB of raw data and make it query-ready in 10 days. The largest table, 7,7bn rows and just over 1TB in size, loaded at 6,1GB per hour.
The queries required the system to access detailed data and return results repeatedly, in an ad hoc fashion. The benchmark applied 10 queries simultaneously, multiple times, to test query performance and user scalability. The benchmark results revealed that query performance and system utilization remained consistently excellent as users increased.
Data warehouse specifications
Red Brick Warehouse 5.1 features a high-performance loader, self-tuning, query parallelism and a family of join technologies. The HP 9000 V2200, featuring 16 200MHz, 64-bit, PA-8200 CPUs, worked in conjunction with two EMC Symmetrix 3700 Enterprise Storage systems. The server was configured with 16GB of memory; total mirrored storage capacity of the EMC Symmetrix systems was 5,8TB; and 1,5TB of disk space was used.
Red Brick is represented in South Africa by Software Futures, a Computer Configurations Holdings company.
Share