STAC-M3 Report: kdb+ on HP DL980 G7 & StorageWorks D2700

Audited STAC-M3 Benchmark of Kx Systems kdb+ 2.7 on the HP DL980 G7 server and HP StorageWorks D2700.

STAC has released audited STAC-M3 Benchmarks of the following system:

- Kx Systems kdb+ 2.7
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6.0 with ext4
- HP ProLiant DL980 G7
- 8 x 8-core Intel(R) Processor Xeon(R) CPU X7560 @ 2.27GHz
- HP StorageWorks Array D2700

kdb+ is a system for managing large volumes of real-time and historical timeseries data, such as security prices. The HP DL980 G7 server is a scale-up x86 server, in this case using eight 8-core Intel Xeon X7560 processors. The HP StorageWorks D2700 is a direct-attached SAS storage system.

This project used the Antuco suite of STAC-M3 Benchmarks specified by leading trading firms on the STAC Benchmark Council. The test cases in that suite impose various combinations of I/O-intensive and compute-intensive historical data loads in single-user and multi-user situations.

This solution stack from Kx and HP set several new official STAC-M3 records. For example, the main year-high-bid benchmark (STAC-M3.ß1.1T.YRHIBID.LAT2) was just 8.7 seconds. And the intervalized-statistics benchmark with 100 requesting threads (STAC-M3.ß1.100T.STATS-UI.LAT2) clocked in at just 130.4 seconds, representing a mere 4x degradation versus the same test with one requesting thread (STAC-M3.ß1.1T.STATS-UI.LAT2).

For the full STAC Report, go to www.STACresearch.com/kx. The report page also includes instructions on how to obtain the detailed STAC-M3 Benchmark specifications, as well as the STAC-M3 Test Harness materials and the kdb+ STAC Pack that were used so that you can run comparative benchmarks on your own systems.