EXTEND PERFORMANCE FOR ENTERPRISE DATABASE WORKLOADS
WITH RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX
TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW
Executive summary
Today's economic challenges, along with rising operational and capital cost pressures, are forcing IT teams to examine new options. The pressure to reduce costs and improve scalability means staff must evaluate expensive proprietary or legacy operating system or database environments when replacing old hardware. In addition, many data services (e.g., datamarts and analytic applications) depend on newer technologies, such as solid-state drives (SSDs), scale-up servers, and virtualization. Combined, these factors can put a tremendous strain on IT budgets and resources.
This performance brief highlights Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® as:
• The best environment for deploying leading databases such as Postgres, Oracle, DB2, Vectorwise, Sybase, and others.
• A platform that was thoroughly validated by industry-standard benchmarks, such as the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) and decision support system (DSS).
Best environment
Tested, supported, reliable, secure, and open
database deployment platform
Red Hat Enterprise Linux forms a solid foundation for database deployments, reinforced by thorough testing and the results of many industry-standard benchmarks. Leading databases rely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for high-performance computing and cloud infrastructure, and as a system that is secure and reliable--yet open. Although the worldwide server market demand has softened according to IDC, industry analysts continue to see an increase in Linux server demand—especially for high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud infrastructure deployments:
“Linux servers now represent 21.5% of all server revenue, up 2.1 points when compared with the third quarter of 2011.”1
These deployments demonstrate the ongoing trust that enterprise customers place in open and secure Linux environments, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Ease of performance management
Performing tuning tasks using traditional OS performance tools can be daunting and complex. Tweaking system parameters and allocating, managing, and scheduling resources are all time-consuming, tedious chores. Red Hat Enterprise
1 Worldwide Server Market Revenues Decline 4.0% in Third Quarter as Market Demand Remained Soft, According to IDC http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp? containerId=prUS23808612#.UMAj-IPon-o
Linux comes bundled with many tools and utilities that simplify performance management. These bundled utilities include the following:
Control groups (cgroups) that provide a method for allocating and managing
resources. Benefits include:
• Application consolidation―application resource management • Performance optimization―judicious mapping of cgroups to system
resources, reduced memory latency, and better overall performance • Dynamic resource management―ability to dynamically alter the
resources allocated to each application
• Application isolation―prevents rogue applications from hogging system resources
Automated memory management to align resources for optimum
Non-Uniform Memory Architecture Daemon (NUMA) performance aided by a daemon (numad) utility.
Complete Fair Scheduler (CFS) to support efficient scheduling of runtime and
other resources.
Tuna, a GUI tool to adjust scheduler tunables such as the scheduler policy,
runtime priority, and CPU affinity. Tuna allows changes to running threads, making the results of those changes viewable immediately2.
CFS and NUMA are discussed in more detail later.
Advantages of using Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Performance features
Better features and tools for system and performance administrators are always essential. These tools help manage and tune system performance parameters such as page-swapping, memory latency, scheduling, and others.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux incorporates many performance features to address the system and performance administrators' requirements. The following are just a few of the performance features. (For a complete list of features, visit
www.redhat.com.)
Transparent huge pages (THP)―These efficiently manage large memory
allocations as one unit. Figure 1 shows the performance improvement when THP is used.
Figure 1: Transparent huge pages3
2 Red Hat Enterprise MRG1.3 - Tuna User Guide
numad―A daemon for NUMA systems, numad monitors NUMA
characteristics and manages placement of processes and memory to minimize memory latency and provide optimum performance.
Figure 2: Effect of numad4
I/O schedulers―Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides three I/O schedulers to
help fine-tune the system: CFQ (Completely Fair Queuing), Deadline, and Noop. CFQ ensures fairness by assigning a time slice to each process
performing I/O. Deadline attempts to provide guaranteed latency for requests. Noop implements a simple, first-in, first-out scheduling algorithm.5
• Automatic system tuning for database storage―Red Hat Enterprise Linux comes with a package for automatically tuning the system based on pre-defined common workloads, such as enterprise storage, high network throughput, and power savings.
• Automatic tuning of TCP/IP socket buffer sizes and
application-socket buffer sizes―System administrators no longer need to adjust these parameters for high performance.
Hardware-based acceleration options
Unlike disk storage, investments in solid-state storage must be highly used, since the price premium is high.
To ensure that the database can take full advantage of SSDs, Red Hat has done extensive testing with Fusion-I/O SSDs. Testing demonstrated the power of the operating system with SSDs. By deploying SSDs as transparent front-end caches, Red Hat observed an approximately 200% performance improvement over legacy fiber-channel storage in a decision support workload test, as shown in Table 1.
4 Tuning Red Hat Systems for Databases – Sanjay Rao, Principal Performance Engineer, Red Hat, June 28, 2012 5 Performance Tuning Guide.
Table 1: Summary of performance results.5 Performance metric Legacy FC
storage Fusion-I/O directCache Improvement Aggregate DSS Query Rate
(per hour) 6103.2 11824 1.94x
Single-LUN Peak Read
Throughput (MB/s) 391.4 805.67 2.06x
To overcome poor database performance, organizations often simply add more hardware, such as faster servers, more memory, and even more mechanical drives, with limited effect. Red Hat's test, above, shows that SSDs can be an attractive, cost-effective strategy for improving database performance.
Leadership benchmark results
Enterprises usually have databases such as Oracle, DB2, Sybase, and Microsoft SQL on a Unix or Microsoft server. In performance tests, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 with a purpose-built analytics database emerged as in the top-two fastest, overall, non-clustered 1 TB TPC-H--delivering more than 70% of the query performance at 15% of the cost.6
Figure 3: TPC-H (1 TB) Non-clustered top ten in performance
5 Performance Tuning Guide.
https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Performance_Tuning_Guide/ch06s04s03.htm 6 Leadership TPC-H benchmark performance and price/performance using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
ABOUT RED HAT
Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, using a
community-Figure 4: TPC-H (1 TB) Non-clustered top ten in price/performance
Adding database instances on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 can increase performance by fully utilizing all resources. Binding with control groups (cgroups) can provide even more performance gains, as demonstrated in the graphic above.
Integrated virtualization capabilities
The ease and convenience of using Linux has made it the foundation of many cloud computing infrastructures, and the operating environment for working
with these systems.7 However, the flexibility of virtualization has raised
concerns regarding performance and server degradation. Red Hat Enterprise Linux addresses these concerns.
For example, the results from a decision-support system environment
benchmark running a Sybase database show that virtualized guests can achieve
more than 80% of physical server performance with a single guest on the query-per-hour and query-throughput tests. In a two-guest environment, the sum of two guests achieved 99% of physical-server performance with query-per-hour tests, and 85% with query throughput tests.
Figure 5: Virtualization overhead with single- and multiple-guest environments
powered approach to provide reliable and high-performing cloud, virtualization, storage,
Linux, and middleware technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. Red Hat is an S&P company with more than 70 offices spanning the globe, empowering customers’ businesses.
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The benchmark results show that Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) delivered flexibility through virtualization and obtained excellent virtual machine performance, comparable to performance on physical servers. This level of performance allows administrators to deploy database instances in a virtualized environment without sacrificing performance.
Conclusion
This paper illustrates important proof points for customers who are considering Linux for high-performance enterprise database workloads. The leading benchmarks indicate that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is well designed for database operations and analytics. The various benchmarks and performance best practices also show major database and hardware partners' support and acceptance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The benchmark data not only confirms the performance for transactional and decision support databases but also demonstrates ease of deployment and features that increase performance regardless of database or hardware choice. As a tested and reliable platform for development and deployment, Red Hat
Enterprise Linux also offers performance features and tools for maintaining the system at peak performance. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, enterprises can confidently virtualize critical, high-performance database workloads.
