Recently, a comparison of performance for a DB2 database was done between a Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array and traditional hard disks. Both standard and advanced queries with complex logic was performed to observe any performance gains with the F5100 Flash Array.
From Shu’s blog, The testing environment was built using a Sun Fire X4275 server with two quad-core Intel Xeon X5570 processors and 72 GB of RAM to host the DB2 database server. The Sun Fire X4275 server runs the Solaris 10 OS (Update 8) and the DB2 UDB V9.5 Fixpak 4. Four SAS HBA cards installed in the database server to support the access to four array domains of the F5100 Flash Array, and up to 960 GB of raw storage (40 Sun Flash Modules). Host mirroring across HBAs and domains can be used to increase data availability, which reduces the usable capacity to 480 GB. The second SAS channel of two HBAs are connected to a Sun Storage J4400, which contains 24 x 146 GB disk drives. Two Storage I/O Modules (SIM 0 and SIM 1) are used with the J4400 to support dual-path. A Sun Fire X4200 is used as the workload driver with two duo-core AMD Opteron processors and 16 GB RAM. Two tests had the following results/benefits when using the flash array:
- For complex joining, traditional disk registered 5629.60 total IOPs while flash/disk had 12983.86 IOPs—improving 3.2 times
- For complex queries, traditional disk registered 6416.05 IOPs while flash/disk had 11345.43 IOPs—improving 77%
- Query execution time, disk-only test was 1952 seconds while flash array had 180 seconds—improving 10.8
You can check out the full results in Shu’s blog entry to see how flash and disk technology can be combined to improve IBM DB2 UDB database performance
