Storage has changed dramatically over the last three years driven by SSD developments. Most of the key components necessary for a powerful storage system are available and the cost is highly favorable for direct placement of data files. Some additional infrastructure elements could greatly enhance the flexibility of storage systems with ...

The PerfMon Counters That Just Won't DieOne of the things that's simultaneously great and horrible about the Internet is that once something gets posted out in the ether, it basically never goes away.  (Some day, politicians will realize this.  We can easily fact check their consistency).  Because of longevity of content posted to ...

If you haven't started to read Shashank Pawar (blog), you're missing out. Shashank is part of Microsoft Australia and has been writing some very good content lately. Here's an example from the Reference Architecture for High Performance SQL Server:HP and Microsoft engineering teams have worked together to create a reference architecture to ...

There has been relatively litle activity in TPC Benchmarks recently with the exception of the raft of Dell TPC-H results with Exa Solutions. It could be that systems today are so powerful that few people feel the need for benchmarks. IBM published an 8-way Xeon E7 (Westmere-EX) TPC-E result of 4593 in August, slightly higher than the Fujitsu ...

IBM just published a TPC-H SF 1000 result for their x3850 X5, 4-way Xeon 7560 system featuring a special MAX5 memory expansion board to support 1.5TB memory. In Dec 2010, IBM also published a TPC-H SF1000 for their Power 780 system, 8-way, quad-core, (4 logical processors per physical core). The figure table below shows TPC-H SF 1000 ...

Fujitsu just published an astounding TPC-E benchmark result of 3,800 tpsE for their 8-way Xeon 7560 system, the Primergy RX900 S1. Fujitsu had previously published a TPC-E result of 2046.96 for their 4-way Xeon 7560 system, the Primergy RX600 S5. The new results shows 85.6% scaling from 4-socket to 8-socket. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 ...

NEC announced their 8-way server with Intel's Xeon 7500 launch on 30 March 2010, along with a published TPC-E performance benchmark result. The listed availability date was 24 June 2010, so the 5800/A1080a should now be available, although I have not yet ordered a system for my own personal use. Producing a respectable benchmark result for a ...

HP has just announced the ProLiant DL580 G7 and DL980 G7 servers based on the Xeon 7500 series processors, and the DL585 G7 4-way server with the 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 series (Magny-Cours). Apparently the reason for the delay is that the 8-way DL980 G7 employs custom silicon node controllers (XNC), and possibly, so HP could make a splash in ...

HP has just released TPC-C and TPC-E results for the ProLiant DL380G7 with 2 Xeon 5680 3.33GHz 6-core processor, allowing a direct comparison with their DL385G7 with 2 Opteron 6176 2.3GHz 12-core processors. Last month I complained about the lack of performance results for the Intel Xeon 5600 6-core 32nm processor line for 2-way systems. This ...

At Intel Developer Forum 2009 last week, Microsoft disclosed significant advances in Windows Server 2008 R2 with the elimination of many locks, most prominently the Dispatch Scheduler lock, that impact the ability scale performance up to and beyond 64 cores. Look for the presentation: Microsoft & Intel Innovations in Hardware and Software to ...