Thursday, November 15, 2012

POWER7/PowerVM vs x86/VMware/OracleVM for oracle DB hosting

A Colleague ( http://twitter.com/ZoranGagic ) sent me this great breakdown of x86 vs Power7 for hosting oracle...nice to have it all in one spot (below) also this http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2011/07/even-more-reasons-to-run-oracle-on-vmware.html makes a similar case and now that VMWare have softened up on the vSphere 5 memory tax there is not as much need to go 4.1 as per below



HP c7000 with 16 x BL460 G8
IBM 770
CPU cores
16 x 16 = 256
26
Memory
16 x 144GB = 2304
512GB
Performance, SPECintrate2006
16 x 662 = 10,592
942
Price
est $200K
$452K (approx)
COD
None
18 cores/512GB, cost: $10K for 1 core/16GB



Price difference

2.3 x more expensive
Performance difference
11.2 x faster

Price /performance difference
25.7 x better price performance


This does not include virtualisation or OS costs, but numbers are overwhelming….

General purpose CPU - Intel Xeon E5-2600:
This will be in every major rackmount, blade server, standard chipset support 24 DIMM sockets (24 x 32GB = 768GB), 10 GbE etc….
(Sub $10K for 16 core server with over 144GB memory)

Xeon E5 (2.3b transistors, more CPU cores (8), less heat/power due to 22nm process, bigger L3 cache (20MB)) :
16 cores, 2 chips, 8 cores/chip, 2 threads/core
SPECint_rate_base2006 = 662 (41.3/c)


Power 770 with Power 7:
48 cores, 8 chips, 6 cores/chip, 4 threads/core
SPECint_rate_base2006 =1740 (36.2/c)


Xeon 5670 in HP BL460:
12 cores, 2 chips, 6 cores/chip, 2 threads/core
SPECint_rate_base2006 = 318 (26.5/c)



Enterprise Edition Per-core licensing
Multi-core processors are priced as (number of cores)*(multi-core factor) processors, where the multi-core factor is:

IBM Power 7 CPU Pool with 8 cores = 8 x $47,500 = $380,000
Intel E5 with 16 cores = 16 x $23,750 = $380,000

Better to buy a low cost Intel E5 based server with maximum memory available (768GB) and choose VMware ESX 4.1 (not huge memory costs with ESX 5) and RHEL 6.2 on a farm of blade servers such as:
HP BL460 G8 is available with Intel E5 CPU:

                                                                                                
(VMware ESX 4.1 Enterprise Plus - Unlimited memory
VMware vSphere 4.1 Enterprise Plus for 1 processor (Max 12 cores per processor) + Production (24x7 for Severity 1 issues) 3 Year Support
$5,723.70
                https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/server/
                                                                2-sockets with unlimited virtual guests
                                                                Standard Subscription (1 year) $1,999

                                                                Premium Subscription (1 year) $3,249

Oracle Prod on physical database farm with RAC (or one node RAC to keep it very simple)….many instance on one OS image:
-        Large memory (Intel memory is cheap), separate SGAs for different instance – no memory contention
-        Separate LUNs so IO is well separated between instances, if there are ever any “problem instances” can easily move to another server
-        Huge CPU as hardware and Oracle costs are significantly cheaper


Oracle on VMware (other better supported solution is Oracle VM):