This Configuration and Deployment Guide explores designing and building a Memcached infrastructure that is scalable, reliable, manageable and secure. The guide uses experience with real-world deployments as well as data from benchmark tests. Configuration guidelines on clusters of Intel® Xeon®- and Atom™-based servers take into account differing business scenarios and inform the various tradeoffs to accommodate different Service Level Agreement (SLA) requirements and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) objectives.
This white paper provides an overview of EMC's data protection solutions for the data lake - an active repository to manage varied and complex Big Data workloads
Why is Virtualization Creating Storage Sprawl? By Storage SwitzerlandINFINIDAT
Desktop and server virtualization have brought many benefits to the data center. These two initiatives have allowed IT to respond quickly to the needs of the organization while driving down IT costs, physical footprint requirements and energy demands. But there is one area of the data center that has actually increased in cost since virtualization started to make its way into production… storage. Because of virtualization, more data centers need "ash to meet the random I/O nature of the virtualized environment, which of course is more expensive, on a dollar per GB basis, than hard disk drives. The single biggest problem however is the signi!cant increase in the number of discrete storage systems that service the environment. This “storage sprawl” threatens the return on investment (ROI) of virtualization projects and makes storage more complex to manage.
Learn more at www.infinidat.com.
This white paper provides an overview of EMC's data protection solutions for the data lake - an active repository to manage varied and complex Big Data workloads
Why is Virtualization Creating Storage Sprawl? By Storage SwitzerlandINFINIDAT
Desktop and server virtualization have brought many benefits to the data center. These two initiatives have allowed IT to respond quickly to the needs of the organization while driving down IT costs, physical footprint requirements and energy demands. But there is one area of the data center that has actually increased in cost since virtualization started to make its way into production… storage. Because of virtualization, more data centers need "ash to meet the random I/O nature of the virtualized environment, which of course is more expensive, on a dollar per GB basis, than hard disk drives. The single biggest problem however is the signi!cant increase in the number of discrete storage systems that service the environment. This “storage sprawl” threatens the return on investment (ROI) of virtualization projects and makes storage more complex to manage.
Learn more at www.infinidat.com.
Rethink Storage: Transform the Data Center with EMC ViPR Software-Defined Sto...EMC
This white paper discusses the evolution of the Software-Defined Data Center and the challenges of heterogeneous storage silos in making the SDDC a reality.
White Paper: Rethink Storage: Transform the Data Center with EMC ViPR Softwar...EMC
This white paper discusses the software-defined data center (SDCC) and challenges of heterogeneous storage silos in making SDDC a reality. It introduces EMC ViPR software-defined storage, which enables enterprise IT departments and service providers to transform physical storage arrays into simple, extensible, open virtual storage platform.
Over the past decade the trend in infrastructure design has been towards scale-out architectures based on
the x86 processor, where many machines are clustered together in order to create a virtual mainframe. In
this paper we set out to challenge this approach and to demonstrate that modern mainframe technology
represents a viable scale-up alternative to the current vogue for racks filled with blades, looking in particular
at the way organisations can benefit in terms of improved agility, increased reliability and cost savings by
consolidating Oracle databases onto IBM’s zEnterprise and Enterprise Linux Servers (ELS).
Transaction processing systems are generally considered easier to scale than data warehouses. Relational databases were designed for this type of workload, and there are no esoteric hardware requirements. Mostly, it is just matter of normalizing to the right degree and getting the indexes right. The major challenge in these systems is their extreme concurrency, which means that small temporary slowdowns can escalate to major issues very quickly.
In this presentation, Gwen Shapira will explain how application developers and DBAs can work together to built a scalable and stable OLTP system - using application queues, connection pools and strategic use of caches in different layers of the system.
Dedicated servers - is your project cracking under pressure?Orlaith Palmer
As your business grows, your computing needs will change. It’s common for established businesses to
encounter capacity constraints with on-premises servers, for instance. Others may discover issues with
enabling an increasingly mobile workforce to access business applications via the internet.
The Citrix Virtual Desktop Handbook examines the project lifecycle for a desktop virtualization project.
The Handbook provides the methodology, experience and best practices needed to successfully design your own desktop virtualization solution
https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX136546
Efficient and scalable multitenant placement approach for in memory database ...CSITiaesprime
Of late Multitenant model with In-Memory database has become prominent area for research. The paper has used advantages of multitenancy to reduce the cost for hardware, labor and make availability of storage by sharing database memory and file execution. The purpose of this paper is to give overview of proposed Supple architecture for implementing in-memory database backend and multitenancy, applicable in public and private cloud settings. Backend in memory database uses column-oriented approach with dictionary based compression technique. We used dedicated sample benchmark for the workload processing and also adopt the SLA penalty model. In particular, we present two approximation algorithms, multi-tenant placement (MTP) and best-fit greedy to show the quality of tenant placement. The experimental results show that MTP algorithm is scalable and efficient in comparison with best-fit greedy algorithm over proposed architecture.
Rethink Storage: Transform the Data Center with EMC ViPR Software-Defined Sto...EMC
This white paper discusses the evolution of the Software-Defined Data Center and the challenges of heterogeneous storage silos in making the SDDC a reality.
White Paper: Rethink Storage: Transform the Data Center with EMC ViPR Softwar...EMC
This white paper discusses the software-defined data center (SDCC) and challenges of heterogeneous storage silos in making SDDC a reality. It introduces EMC ViPR software-defined storage, which enables enterprise IT departments and service providers to transform physical storage arrays into simple, extensible, open virtual storage platform.
Over the past decade the trend in infrastructure design has been towards scale-out architectures based on
the x86 processor, where many machines are clustered together in order to create a virtual mainframe. In
this paper we set out to challenge this approach and to demonstrate that modern mainframe technology
represents a viable scale-up alternative to the current vogue for racks filled with blades, looking in particular
at the way organisations can benefit in terms of improved agility, increased reliability and cost savings by
consolidating Oracle databases onto IBM’s zEnterprise and Enterprise Linux Servers (ELS).
Transaction processing systems are generally considered easier to scale than data warehouses. Relational databases were designed for this type of workload, and there are no esoteric hardware requirements. Mostly, it is just matter of normalizing to the right degree and getting the indexes right. The major challenge in these systems is their extreme concurrency, which means that small temporary slowdowns can escalate to major issues very quickly.
In this presentation, Gwen Shapira will explain how application developers and DBAs can work together to built a scalable and stable OLTP system - using application queues, connection pools and strategic use of caches in different layers of the system.
Dedicated servers - is your project cracking under pressure?Orlaith Palmer
As your business grows, your computing needs will change. It’s common for established businesses to
encounter capacity constraints with on-premises servers, for instance. Others may discover issues with
enabling an increasingly mobile workforce to access business applications via the internet.
The Citrix Virtual Desktop Handbook examines the project lifecycle for a desktop virtualization project.
The Handbook provides the methodology, experience and best practices needed to successfully design your own desktop virtualization solution
https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX136546
Efficient and scalable multitenant placement approach for in memory database ...CSITiaesprime
Of late Multitenant model with In-Memory database has become prominent area for research. The paper has used advantages of multitenancy to reduce the cost for hardware, labor and make availability of storage by sharing database memory and file execution. The purpose of this paper is to give overview of proposed Supple architecture for implementing in-memory database backend and multitenancy, applicable in public and private cloud settings. Backend in memory database uses column-oriented approach with dictionary based compression technique. We used dedicated sample benchmark for the workload processing and also adopt the SLA penalty model. In particular, we present two approximation algorithms, multi-tenant placement (MTP) and best-fit greedy to show the quality of tenant placement. The experimental results show that MTP algorithm is scalable and efficient in comparison with best-fit greedy algorithm over proposed architecture.
Caching for Microservices Architectures: Session IVMware Tanzu
In this 60 minute webinar, we will cover the key areas of consideration for data layer decisions in a microservices architecture, and how a caching layer, satisfies these requirements. You’ll walk away from this webinar with a better understanding of the following concepts:
- How microservices are easy to scale up and down, so both the service layer and the data layer need to support this elasticity.
- Why microservices simplify and accelerate the software delivery lifecycle by splitting up effort into smaller isolated pieces that autonomous teams can work on independently. Event-driven systems promote autonomy.
- Where microservices can be distributed across availability zones and data centers for addressing performance and availability requirements. Similarly, the data layer should support this distribution of workload.
- How microservices can be part of an evolution that includes your legacy applications. Similarly, the data layer must accommodate this graceful on-ramp to microservices.
Presenter : Jagdish Mirani is a Product Marketing Manager in charge of Pivotal’s in-memory products
2020 Cloud Data Lake Platforms Buyers Guide - White paper | QuboleVasu S
Qubole's buyer guide about how cloud data lake platform helps organizations to achieve efficiency & agility by adopting an open data lake platform and why data lakes are moving to the cloud
https://www.qubole.com/resources/white-papers/2020-cloud-data-lake-platforms-buyers-guide
Small and medium-sized businesses can reduce software licensing and other OPE...Principled Technologies
A cluster of these servers ran a mix of applications with up to 27 percent better application performance than a previous-generation cluster, which
could allow companies to do a given amount of work with fewer servers
Conclusion
As you do your best to balance timing, budget, IT resources, and your current and anticipated server needs, consider how opting for newer servers could help your business. As our testing showed, there are clear benefits to choosing servers that support such workload requirements as keeping databases running at a quick pace and delivering speedy hosting for your business’s website. Plus, a solution that offers the capacity and software features to perform well while natively supporting Kubernetes containers could add value in terms of setup, flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. And you can achieve all of this and possibly reduce OPEX in the process.
In our testing with a mixed workload that reflects some of the needs common to small and medium businesses, a cluster of 16G Dell PowerEdge R7615 single-socket servers powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors outperformed a cluster of previous-generation 15G Dell PowerEdge R7515 servers, with improvements of up to 27 percent and latency reduction of up to 50 percent. These results show that upgrading to the new Dell solution can be a smart step toward meeting the needs of your users now and in the years to come.
The Journey Toward the Software-Defined Data CenterCognizant
Computing's evolution toward a software-defined data center (SDDC) -- an extension of the cloud delivery model of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) -- is complex and multifaceted, involving multiple layers of virtualization: servers, storage, and networking. We provide a detailed adoption roadmap to guide your efforts.
INTRODUCTION : Server Centric IT Architecture and its Limitations; Storage – Centric IT Architecture and its advantages; Case study: Replacing a server with Storage Networks; The Data Storage and Data Access problem; The Battle for size and access.
INTELLIGENT DISK SUBSYSTEMS – 1
Architecture of Intelligent Disk Subsystems; Hard disks and Internal I/O Channels, JBOD, Storage virtualization using RAID and different RAID levels;
Enterprise data-centers are straining to keep pace with dynamic business demands, as well as to incorporate advanced technologies and architectures that aim to improve infrastructure performance
Build your private cloud with paa s using linuxz cover story enterprise tech ...Elena Nanos
This article has been published as a cover story of Enterprise Tech Journal Jun 2013 issue, at - http://enterprisesystemsmedia.com/article/build-your-private-cloud-with-paas-using-linux-on-system-z.
Do you know that according to Gartner poll, Private Cloud project deployments are increasing significantly in 2013 and nearly 90% of customers are looking at Private Cloud implementation and are either in the planning or early deployment stages? Is your shop currently looking into Private Platform as a Service (PaaS) Cloud implementation? Have you looked into what zEnterprise has to offer in this space?
This article gives insight on Private Cloud Implementation on zEnterprise and can help you learn how your organization can benefit from implementing a Dev/Test private cloud using PaaS with Linux on System z and why WebSphere Application Server (WAS) may be a perfect fit for a Dev/Test Private Cloud.
Learn how your organization can cut IT costs by deploying “self-service” for developers, using Dev/Test Private Cloud.
This article goes over what Applications are a good fit for Dev/Test Private Cloud and the benefits of this implementation, such as :
• Reduce the number of Dev/Test WAS environments using dedicated resources
• Reduce hardware and software license costs
• Improve speed of upgrades
• Standardize procedures and software levels
• Let developers set up and use new environments in minutes instead of days or weeks
• Simplify WAS infrastructure management
Article also goes over the key differences in managing cloud infrastructure on distributed platforms vs. mainframes and shows how Linux on System z plays a critical role in creating PaaS clouds.
• Mainframes can scale vertically, while distributed servers can scale horizontally.
• Linux on System z has much higher densities of virtual machines per processor core compared to distributed servers.
• Cloud implementation on zEnterprise can dynamically allocate workloads to available pooled resources.
• Linux on System z leverages z/VM’s ability to virtualize CPUs and memory, as well as share those resources among many Linux guests. One IFL can run the equivalent of many distributed servers.
• Consolidation of Linux workloads on a single physical hardware server allows multiple Linux images to run on z/VM IFLs without affecting IBM software charges for existing System z general processors.
Creating private cloud to host dev/test environments can save your company money and increase efficiency. Start small, but think big; create a cloud strategy and roadmap that involves getting leadership buy in, building business cases and presenting them in stages within your organization, standardizing procedures and using a fit-for-purpose approach to select pilot applications.
Connect with author of this article, Elena Nanos, on Linkedin at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/elena-nanos/1/a47/70a
Espresso: LinkedIn's Distributed Data Serving Platform (Paper)Amy W. Tang
This paper, written by the LinkedIn Espresso Team, appeared at the ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference (June 2013). To see the talk given by Swaroop Jagadish (Staff Software Engineer @ LinkedIn), go here:
http://www.slideshare.net/amywtang/li-espresso-sigmodtalk
Sigmod 2013 - On Brewing Fresh Espresso - LinkedIn's Distributed Data Serving...Mihir Gandhi
Espresso is a document-oriented distributed data serving platform that has been built to address LinkedIn’s requirements for a scalable, performant, source-of-truth primary
store. It provides a hierarchical document model, transac-
tional support for modifications to related documents, real-
time secondary indexing, on-the-fly schema evolution and
provides a timeline consistent change capture stream. This
paper describes the motivation and design principles involved
in building Espresso, the data model and capabilities ex-
posed to clients, details of the replication and secondary
indexing implementation and presents a set of experimen-
tal results that characterize the performance of the system
along various dimensions.
Using a Field Programmable Gate Array to Accelerate Application PerformanceOdinot Stanislas
Intel s'intéresse tout particulièrement aux FPGA et notamment au potentiel qu'ils apportent lorsque les ISV et développeurs ont des besoins très spécifiques en Génomique, traitement d'images, traitement de bases de données, et même dans le Cloud. Dans ce document vous aurez l'occasion d'en savoir plus sur notre stratégie, et sur un programme de recherche lancé par Intel et Altera impliquant des Xeon E5 équipés... de FPGA
Intel is looking at FPGA and what they bring to ISVs and developers and their very specific needs in genomics, image processing, databases, and even in the cloud. In this document you will have the opportunity to learn more about our strategy, and a research program initiated by Intel and Altera involving Xeon E5 with... FPGA inside.
Auteur(s)/Author(s):
P. K. Gupta, Director of Cloud Platform Technology, Intel Corporation
Hands-on Lab: How to Unleash Your Storage Performance by Using NVM Express™ B...Odinot Stanislas
(FR)
Voici un excellent document qui explique étape après étape comment installer, monitorer et surtout correctement benchmarker ses SSD PCIe/NVMe (pas si simple que ça). Autre élément clé : comment analyser la charge I/O de véritables applications? Combien d'IOPS, en read, en write, quelle bande passante et surtout quel impact sur la durée de vie des SSD? Bref à mettre en toute les mains, et un merci à mon collègue Andrey Kudryavtsev.
(EN)
An excellent content which describe step by step how to install, monitor and benchmark PCIe/NVMe SSD (many trick not so simple). Another key learning: how to measure real I/O activities on a real workload? How many R/W IOPS, block size, throughtput, and finally what's the impact on SSD endurance and (real)life? A must read, and a huge thanks to my colleague Andrey Kudryavtsev.
Auteurs/Authors:
Andrey Kudryavtsev, SSD Solution Architect, Intel Corporation
Zhdan Bybin, Application Engineer, Intel Corporation
Le SDN et NFV sont très à la mode en ce moment car en passant des appliance physiques aux équipement réseau massivement logiciel, celà devrait offrir une grande flexibilité et agilité aux entreprises (et telco en particulier). Néanmoins chainer des services réseau est un exercice encore très complexe et ce document vous explique ce qu'il est déjà possible de faire sur OpenStack en couplant par exemple : un load balancer (BigIP), un Firewall (BigIP), un réseau virtuel WAN (RiverBed) ou encore un routeur virtuel (Brocade).
Ceph: Open Source Storage Software Optimizations on Intel® Architecture for C...Odinot Stanislas
Après la petite intro sur le stockage distribué et la description de Ceph, Jian Zhang réalise dans cette présentation quelques benchmarks intéressants : tests séquentiels, tests random et surtout comparaison des résultats avant et après optimisations. Les paramètres de configuration touchés et optimisations (Large page numbers, Omap data sur un disque séparé, ...) apportent au minimum 2x de perf en plus.
SNIA : Swift Object Storage adding EC (Erasure Code)Odinot Stanislas
In depth presentation on EC integration in Swift object storage. Content delivered by Paul Luse, Sr. Staff Engineer @ Intel and Kevin Greenan, Staff Software Engineer - Box during fall SNIA event
PCI Express* based Storage: Data Center NVM Express* Platform TopologiesOdinot Stanislas
(FR)
Le PCI Express se démocratise de plus en plus dans les serveurs. Présents depuis des années comme bus pour les cartes d'extensions, on va maintenant le trouver en façades des serveurs pour servir des disque flash 2,5 pouces (connecteur SF-8639) et sous la forme de câble appelés OCulink.
(EN)
PCI Express is becoming more and more present in servers. As a communication bus for extension cards since years, now it will serve 2.5 inches flash drive and through PCIe cables named OCulink.
Auteurs/Authors:
Michael Hall
Director of Technology Solutions Enabling, Data Center Group, Intel Corporation
Jonmichael Hands
Technical Program Manager, Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group, Intel Corporation
Bare-metal, Docker Containers, and Virtualization: The Growing Choices for Cl...Odinot Stanislas
(FR)
Introduction très sympathique autour des environnements Cloud avec un focus particulier sur la virtualisation et les containers (Docker)
(ENG)
Friendly presentation about Cloud solutions with a focus on virtualization and containers (Docker).
Author: Nicholas Weaver – Principal Architect, Intel Corporation
Software Defined Storage - Open Framework and Intel® Architecture TechnologiesOdinot Stanislas
(FR)
Dans cette présentation vous aurez le plaisir d'y trouver une introduction plutôt détaillées sur la notion de "SDS Controller" qui est en résumé la couche applicative destinée à contrôler à terme toutes les technologies de stockage (SAN, NAS, stockage distribué sur disque, flash...) et chargée de les exposer aux orchestrateurs de Cloud et donc aux applications.
(ENG)
This presentation cover in detail the notion of "SDS Controller" which is in summary a software stack able to handle all storage technologies (SAN, NDA, distributed file systems on disk, flash...) and expose it to Cloud orchestrators and applications. Lots of good content.
Virtualizing the Network to enable a Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI)Odinot Stanislas
Une très intéressante présentation autour de la virtualisation des réseaux contenant des explications détaillées autour des VLAN, VXLAN, mais aussi d'NVGRE et surtout de GENEVE (Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation) supporté pour la première fois sur la dernière carte 40 GbE d'Intel (XL710)
Intel développe une "ONP" (Open Network Platform) dit autrement un switch ouvert offrant les fonctions de base nécessaires au SDN. Si vous souhaitez connaitre le matériel utilisé, les stack logicielle exploitée et les compatibilité avec notamment les orchestrateurs, ce doc est fait pour vous.
Moving to PCI Express based SSD with NVM ExpressOdinot Stanislas
Une très bonne présentation qui introduit la technologie NVM Express qui sera à coup sure l'interface du futur (proche) des "disques" SSD. Adieu SAS et SATA, bienvenu au PCI Express dans les serveurs (et postes clients)
Intel and Siveo wrote this content which explain how their Cloud Orchestrator is working. You will learn how to configure it, benefit from automatical workload placement feature and manage multiple hypervisors transparently.
Intel IT Open Cloud - What's under the Hood and How do we Drive it?Odinot Stanislas
L'IT d'Intel fait sa révolution et s'impose d'agir comme un "Cloud Service Provider". La transformation est initiée avec au programme la mise en place d'un Cloud Fédéré, Interopérable et Open mais aussi d'un framework de maturité, du DevOps et de la prise de risque. Bref, vraiment intéressant
Dans ce document vous trouverez les dernières améliorations faites sur OpenStack et comment certaines technologies Intel dopent la performance et la sécurité de l'environnement Cloud. Quelques exemple avec :
Comment créer des "pool" de VM sécurisées avec possibilité de géo tagging (technologies Intel présentent dans les serveurs HP, DELL, IBM… + Folsom, Nova, Horizon, Open Attestation)
Comment doper la sécurité du nouveau module de gestion des clés d'OpenStack (technologies Intel + Barbican)
Comment benchmarker le stockage object Swift avec COSBench (qui supporte maintenant Ceph, S3 et Amplidata)
Auteurs:
Girish Gopal - Strategic Planning, Intel Corporation
Malini Bhandaru - Security Architect, Intel Corporation
Scale-out Storage on Intel® Architecture Based Platforms: Characterizing and ...Odinot Stanislas
Issue du salon orienté développeurs d'Intel (l'IDF) voici une présentation plutôt sympa sur le stockage dit "scale out" avec une présentation des différents fournisseurs de solutions (slide 6) comprenant ceux qui font du mode fichier, bloc et objet. Puis du benchmark sur certains d'entre eux dont Swift, Ceph et GlusterFS.
Big Data and Intel® Intelligent Systems Solution for Intelligent transportationOdinot Stanislas
Explications sur comment il est possible d'utiliser la puissance d'Hadoop pour analyser les vidéos des caméras présentent sur les réseaux routiers avec pour objectif d'identifier l'état du trafic, le type de véhicule en déplacement et même l'usurpation de plaques d'immatriculation.
Builder.ai Founder Sachin Dev Duggal's Strategic Approach to Create an Innova...Ramesh Iyer
In today's fast-changing business world, Companies that adapt and embrace new ideas often need help to keep up with the competition. However, fostering a culture of innovation takes much work. It takes vision, leadership and willingness to take risks in the right proportion. Sachin Dev Duggal, co-founder of Builder.ai, has perfected the art of this balance, creating a company culture where creativity and growth are nurtured at each stage.
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and GrafanaRTTS
Watch this recorded webinar about real-time monitoring of application performance. See how to integrate Apache JMeter, the open-source leader in performance testing, with InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization application.
In this webinar, we will review the benefits of leveraging InfluxDB and Grafana when executing load tests and demonstrate how these tools are used to visualize performance metrics.
Length: 30 minutes
Session Overview
-------------------------------------------
During this webinar, we will cover the following topics while demonstrating the integrations of JMeter, InfluxDB and Grafana:
- What out-of-the-box solutions are available for real-time monitoring JMeter tests?
- What are the benefits of integrating InfluxDB and Grafana into the load testing stack?
- Which features are provided by Grafana?
- Demonstration of InfluxDB and Grafana using a practice web application
To view the webinar recording, go to:
https://www.rttsweb.com/jmeter-integration-webinar
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 4. In this session, we will cover Test Manager overview along with SAP heatmap.
The UiPath Test Manager overview with SAP heatmap webinar offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the role of a Test Manager within SAP environments, coupled with the utilization of heatmaps for effective testing strategies.
Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
In this insightful webinar, Inflectra explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and testing. Discover how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Learn about:
• The Future of Testing: How AI is shifting testing towards verification, analysis, and higher-level skills, while reducing repetitive tasks.
• Test Automation: How AI-powered test case generation, optimization, and self-healing tests are making testing more efficient and effective.
• Visual Testing: Explore the emerging capabilities of AI in visual testing and how it's set to revolutionize UI verification.
• Inflectra's AI Solutions: See demonstrations of Inflectra's cutting-edge AI tools like the ChatGPT plugin and Azure Open AI platform, designed to streamline your testing process.
Whether you're a developer, tester, or QA professional, this webinar will give you valuable insights into how AI is shaping the future of software delivery.
Generating a custom Ruby SDK for your web service or Rails API using Smithyg2nightmarescribd
Have you ever wanted a Ruby client API to communicate with your web service? Smithy is a protocol-agnostic language for defining services and SDKs. Smithy Ruby is an implementation of Smithy that generates a Ruby SDK using a Smithy model. In this talk, we will explore Smithy and Smithy Ruby to learn how to generate custom feature-rich SDKs that can communicate with any web service, such as a Rails JSON API.
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
Kubernetes & AI - Beauty and the Beast !?! @KCD Istanbul 2024Tobias Schneck
As AI technology is pushing into IT I was wondering myself, as an “infrastructure container kubernetes guy”, how get this fancy AI technology get managed from an infrastructure operational view? Is it possible to apply our lovely cloud native principals as well? What benefit’s both technologies could bring to each other?
Let me take this questions and provide you a short journey through existing deployment models and use cases for AI software. On practical examples, we discuss what cloud/on-premise strategy we may need for applying it to our own infrastructure to get it to work from an enterprise perspective. I want to give an overview about infrastructure requirements and technologies, what could be beneficial or limiting your AI use cases in an enterprise environment. An interactive Demo will give you some insides, what approaches I got already working for real.
GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using Deplo...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
Accelerate your Kubernetes clusters with Varnish CachingThijs Feryn
A presentation about the usage and availability of Varnish on Kubernetes. This talk explores the capabilities of Varnish caching and shows how to use the Varnish Helm chart to deploy it to Kubernetes.
This presentation was delivered at K8SUG Singapore. See https://feryn.eu/presentations/accelerate-your-kubernetes-clusters-with-varnish-caching-k8sug-singapore-28-2024 for more details.
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI support
Configuration and Deployment Guide For Memcached on Intel® Architecture
1. Copyright 2013 Intel Corporation – All Rights Reserved Page 1
Configuration and Deployment Guide
For Memcached on Intel® Architecture
About this Guide
This Configuration and Deployment Guide explores designing and building a Memcached infrastructure
that is scalable, reliable, manageable and secure. The guide uses experience with real-world
deployments as well as data from benchmark tests. Configuration guidelines on clusters of Intel®
Xeon®- and Atom™-based servers take into account differing business scenarios and inform the various
tradeoffs to accommodate different Service Level Agreement (SLA) requirements and Total Cost of
Ownership (TCO) objectives.
Table of Contents
1.0 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................................................... 2
2.0 Driving Forces and Strategic Considerations...................................................................................................................... 3
3.0 Overview of the Memcached Architecture ........................................................................................................................ 4
3.1 Primary Objective: Reduce Transaction Latency ........................................................................................................... 4
3.2 Theory of Operation...................................................................................................................................................... 4
4.0 Configuration and Deployment.......................................................................................................................................... 5
4.1 Memcached Cluster Topology....................................................................................................................................... 5
4.2 Software Architecture ................................................................................................................................................... 7
4.3 Performance Considerations......................................................................................................................................... 7
4.3.1 Hit-Rate..................................................................................................................................................................... 7
4.3.2 Cache Request Throughout ...................................................................................................................................... 8
4.3.3 Latency ..................................................................................................................................................................... 8
4.4 Server Hardware Configurations ................................................................................................................................... 9
4.4.1 Memory Sizing ........................................................................................................................................................ 10
4.4.2 Networking ............................................................................................................................................................. 10
4.4.3 Intel Xeon-based Platforms .................................................................................................................................... 10
4.4.4 Intel Atom-based Platforms.................................................................................................................................... 10
4.5 Memcached Tuning and Optimization ........................................................................................................................ 11
4.5.1 Hardware and Software Optimization.................................................................................................................... 11
4.5.2 Memcached Performance Tuning........................................................................................................................... 11
5.0 Summary .......................................................................................................................................................................... 12
6.0 Appendix A – Additional Resources.................................................................................................................................. 13
2. Copyright 2013 Intel Corporation – All Rights Reserved Page 2
1.0Introduction
With the growth of online commerce and social media, more Web pages have become dynamic—their
content varies based on parameters provided by users or by software. Dynamic Web pages store
content in databases rather than HTML pages to support uses like online credit card transactions and ad
serving.
The surging use of dynamic Web content can overwhelm traditional data centers as they strive to
comply with Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Specifically, the memory capacity of any given server in
the data center may be insufficient to support the in-memory operations required for timely execution
and a good user experience.
Originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick in 2003 to address dynamic Web performance and scalability for
his LiveJournal Website, Memcached is an open-source, multi-threaded, distributed, Key-Value caching
solution commonly used for delivering software-as-a-service, reducing service latency and traffic to
database and computational servers. It implements a coherent in-memory RAM cache that scales
across a cluster of servers. Memcached exploits the fact that the typical access time for DRAM is orders
of magnitude faster than disk access times, thus enabling considerably lower latency and much greater
throughput. So a caching tier is employed that can cache “hot” data and reduce costly trips back to the
database to read data from disk.
Memcached delivers a performance boost for applications because it caches data and objects in
memory to reduce the number of times an external data source must be read from disk. By making
frequently accessed information immediately available in memory, Memcached provides an important
speed advantage when application performance is critical and resource constraints make accessing the
original data from disk too time consuming and expensive.
In dynamic Web applications, where a large percentage of the information served to users results from
back-end processing, the ability to cache the values in RAM has proved to be advantageous, especially in
response to fast-trending social media peak usage patterns and so-called “hot-key” requests (e.g., a
surge of requests for a “hot” video clip, picture or other piece of popular content).
During the past 10 years, Memcached has been implemented by major cloud and Web service delivery
companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Flickr, Craigslist to reduce latency for serving
Web data to consumers and to ease the demand on back-end database and application servers. In
addition, many enterprise data centers also implement Memcached to improve the response-times for a
range of database-oriented applications.
3. Copyright 2013 Intel Corporation – All Rights Reserved Page 3
2.0Driving Forces and Strategic Considerations
The extreme rate of data growth associated with Cloud usage models, and the cost advantage of
spinning media over alternatives for long-term retention of that data put a crunch on data centers for
both public cloud service providers and for internal enterprise operations. Front-end service demands
already go well beyond the capabilities of conventional disk-based storage and retrieval technologies.
Just a few examples:
15 out of 17 U.S. business sectors have more data stored per company than the U.S. Library of
Congress (McKinsey Global Institute, 2011)
62 percent of organizations use between 100 terabytes and 9 petabytes of data (ODCA, 2012)
Volume of data is doubling every 18 months (IDC, 2011)
Twitter receives over 200 million tweets per day (ODCA, 2012)
Facebook collects an average of 15 terabytes per day (ODCA, 2012)
Even relatively static content cannot be fetched fast enough from disk to keep up with escalating
demands, especially when hot-key trends occur with millions of requests for the same information.
To make matters even more challenging, a growing percentage of dynamic Web requests now require a
process or logic to run to create the requested item. The prospect of recalculating and serving the same
result potentially millions of times to update Web content presents an intolerable bottleneck.
Users don’t care about all of these difficulties going on behind the scenes to scale performance to meet
their aggregate demands. If end-users perceive unacceptable delays, then from the users’ perspective,
“the system is broken”, and they give up or move on to another site. Implementation of an efficient and
scalable caching architecture between the Web tier and the application and database tiers has emerged
as a viable and affordable solution.
Memcached has become the dominant open-source architecture for enabling Web tier services to scale
to tens of thousands of systems without either 1) overwhelming the database, or 2) accruing geometric
queuing delays that cause unacceptable end-user experiences.
Well-designed Memcached clusters can consistently support a latency SLA in the 100 µsec range while
scaling to support very large Web server farms. In addition to caching database queries and other Web
service information, enterprise data centers also use Memcached to minimize database load for a
variety of client/server applications (e.g., order processing). Memcached also offers the ability to
add/remove incremental data caching capacity in response to quickly changing requirements.
4. Copyright 2013 Intel Corporation – All Rights Reserved Page 4
3.0Overview of the Memcached Architecture
3.1 Primary Objective: Reduce Transaction Latency
Memcached intercepts data requests and satisfies a high percentage of them out of its logical cache (i.e.
system memory), thereby avoiding trips to read data from back-end disk storage. Memcached also
helps reduce compute-intensive tasks by retrieving pre-computed values from the logical cache, thereby
avoiding the need for repetitive computations of the same value. In both cases, Memcached can reduce
the overall time for responding to requests with cached data. That improves the sustained level of
transaction latency.
3.2 Theory of Operation
Memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, originally intended for
use in speeding-up dynamic Web applications.
At its heart, Memcached is a simple but very powerful key/value store. Its uncomplicated design
promotes ease of deployment while alleviating performance problems facing large data caches.
A typical Memcached implementation consists of the following basic elements:
Client software, which is given a list of available Memcached servers
A client-based hashing algorithm, which chooses a server based on the "key" input
Server software, which stores the values with their keys into an internal hash table
Server algorithms that determine when to discard old data to free up or reuse memory
A Memcached deployment is implemented partially in a client, and partially in a server. Clients
understand how to send items to particular servers, what to do when a server cannot be contacted, and
how to fetch keys from the servers. The servers understand how to receive items, how to service
requests and how to expire items when more memory is needed.
The Memcached interface provides the basic primitives that hash tables provide—insertion, deletion, and
retrieval—as well as more complex operations built atop them. Data are stored as individual items, each
including a key, a value, and metadata. Item size can vary from a few bytes up to 1MB, although most
Memcached implementations are heavily skewed toward smaller items.
Memcached servers generally are not aware of each other. There is no crosstalk, no synchronization, no
broadcasting or other need for inter-server communications. The lack of interconnections between
Memcached servers means that adding more servers will add more capacity, offering excellent
scalability.
The rest of this Guide focuses on the issues involved with configuring and tuning Memcached clusters to
deliver optimal performance, security and scalability on Intel® Architecture-based servers.
5. Copyright 2013 Intel Corporation – All Rights Reserved Page 5
4.0Configuration and Deployment
As data size increases in the application, Memcached scales smoothly to provide consistent
performance, even with very large databases and low-latency application demands. Two primary scaling
methods are to add more RAM to a server and/or to add more servers to the network.
4.1 Memcached Cluster Topology
In a typical Web-serving datacenter deployment, Memcached servers operate in a cluster located
between the front-end Web tier and the back-end database storage tiers (See Figure 1). The size of the
cluster (e.g. number of servers and RAM per server) depends upon application requirements and
performance criteria as described in subsequent sections. See Section 4.3 on Performance
Considerations for more detail regarding the metrics to consider when scaling out the number of servers
in a Memcached cluster.
Figure 1 Memcached Cluster Architecture
6. Copyright 2013 Intel Corporation – All Rights Reserved Page 6
The Memcached cluster reduces latency by intercepting requests that would otherwise be handled by
application servers fetching the data from database storage every time an item is requested.
Figures 2 and 3 illustrate the differences between a non-cached Web infrastructure versus a
Memcached Web infrastructure. Figure 2 shows a typical client server topology without a caching tier.
Each request must pass through an application server and requires one or more queries to the database.
In Figure 3, the same system is fitted with a Memcached cluster sitting between the client(s) and the
server(s). It matches-up requests with the memory cache before returning results to the client. In the
rare case of a cache-miss, the request goes to the application server, as before.
Figure 2 - Typical Client/Server Web Topology
Figure 3 - Memcached-Enabled Web Server Topology
7. Copyright 2013 Intel Corporation – All Rights Reserved Page 7
4.2 Software Architecture
Memcached uses a client/server software model in which all servers maintain a key-value associative
array that clients populate and query. Keys are up to 250 bytes long and values can be up to 1MB in size,
however typical deployments average less than 1KB value sizes.
Memcached clients make use of consistent hashing methodology to select a unique server per key,
requiring only the knowledge of the total number of servers and their IP addresses. This technique
presents the entire aggregate data in the servers as a unified distributed hash table, thereby keeping all
servers completely independent and facilitating scalability as the overall data size grows.
Each client knows all of the servers. The servers do not communicate with each other. If a client wants
to set or read the value corresponding to a certain key, the client’s library computes a hash of the key to
determine the server that will be used. Then the client contacts that server, which computes a second
hash of the key to determine where to store or read the corresponding value.
In a Memcached cluster, all client libraries use the same hashing algorithm to determine servers, which
enables any client to read other clients’ cached data. That offers a significant advantage for “peanut
buttering” hot-trending values within the common cache array and having them immediately available
for serving to any client upon request.
The servers keep all current values in RAM for fast access. If a server runs out of RAM, it discards the
oldest values. That means that clients cannot treat any of the cache locations as persistent memory, but
it also means that the Memcached can dynamically respond to changing trends in end user request
patterns; thereby providing faster responsiveness to the most recent, repetitive and hot-trending
information requests.
4.3 Performance Considerations
As one of the top contributers to upstream open source projects, Intel provided numerous optimizations
to improve Memcached performance on Intel Architecture-based servers. Through those efforts, we
learned that three main considerations impact performance when deploying, tuning and scaling a
Memcached server cluster. These are: hit-rate; cache request throughput; and latency.
4.3.1 Hit-Rate
Memcached should serve most data requests generated by the Web tier. To accomplish that, the
aggregate size of the key/value store must suffice to cache the majority of requested data objects in
order to achieve an acceptable hit-rate.
Because the Web tier workload varies by user and is dynamically changing over time, large transient
peaks of usage can occur, especially in fast-trending social media environments. General caching theory
still applies: the hit-rate through the tier will improve roughly by half with the quadrupling of the overall
cache capacity; however the acceptable miss-rate must be defined by the specific application
requirements.
8. Copyright 2013 Intel Corporation – All Rights Reserved Page 8
A fixed ratio of Memcached servers to Web servers can achieve a target traffic rate through the cache.
The exact ratio varies depending on specific workload objectives, but a useful center-point is one
Memcached server to every four Web servers, based on testing and real-world experience with Intel®
Xeon® E5 family dual-socket servers.
To achieve price/performance objectives, Memcached servers typically utilize mainstream DRAM
devices in standard DIMM form-factors (RDIMM for mainstream servers and UDIMM where supported).
4.3.2 Cache Request Throughout
The Web tier generates a steady but non-uniform rate of requests to the caching tier. A good way to
think of the workload requirement is:
The Web tier contains “X” servers to support a given capacity target
Each active Web server supports a target of “N” page requests per second
Each page request generates “M” key/value look-ups (gets) to build content
Thus the average load on the Memcached tier is X * M * N gets per second
For example, a Web tier of 10,000 server instances, each targeted to 64 requests per second, with a
Web workload that generates an average of 100 key/value gets per second, would generate a
cumulative load of 64M gets/second. Assuming the 1:4 ratio, and a peanut-buttering of the load across
all cache servers, the Memcached tier would need 2,500 servers, each of which must handle 25,000
gets/second.
The relative popularity of objects (i.e., the number of requests per second) in the key/value store varies
a great deal, with “hot” and “cold” keys in the array. Therefore two distinct considerations regarding
throughput must be taken into account when designing your Memcached tier: (1) the average expected
utilization; and (2) the peak throughput on servers for hot-key demand. In the above example, the
average utilization is 25,000 gets/second, however the peak hot-key throughput must be defined by the
specific application requirements and the targeted user experience (i.e., response-time). For example,
in 2011, Facebook’s stated target for peak throughput for their Memcached tier was 1,000,000
gets/second.
The inherent variability of Web services and the non-uniform nature of the load make it inevitable that
much of the Memcached tier will be underutilized much of the time. So the efficiency challenge in
designing the Memcached tier is to meet the target hot-key peak throughput rate while maintaining the
lowest capital expenditures and operating costs.
4.3.3 Latency
The third performance metric is the latency to respond to each request, as measured from the client
end. .
Your business requirements should determine your latency policy, but a useful rule-of-thumb is that
users may tolerate a range of 100 microseconds to 1 millisecond of response-time. Latency that exceeds
that range may create visible delays for end-users which impinge on their satisfaction and reflect badly
9. Copyright 2013 Intel Corporation – All Rights Reserved Page 9
on your business. Again, the specific amount of tolerable latency varies with the business model, so
your latency polices may differ. In subsequent sections, we will explore ways to change your latency
SLA, as needed.
While occasional excursions in latency can be tolerated, if a high fraction of the requests take too long,
the service has failed to meet the SLA. Therefore, datacenter administration typically monitors the
frequency of SLA violation events and triggers alerts at a specified level.
The latency of a key/value look-up breaks-down into the following elements:
Client: code path to hash the key and identify the target cache server
Client: network stack to transmit the cache look-up request
Network: multi-hop switching delay between client and server nodes
Server: network stack to receive the cache look-up request
Server: code path to look up the value and determine outcome (hit/miss)
Server: network stack to transmit the cache look-up response
Network: multi-hop switching delay between server and client nodes
Client: network stack to receive the cache look-up response
Note that the network stack must be called twice on each end, and the physical network switching path
is traversed twice for each look-up request. Therefore, the two-way communications between client
and server nodes makes up a significant amount of the overall latency. Even if the client and server
nodes are co-resident under the same top-of-rack switch, the network latency could approach 20 µsec
for just the hops back and forth between servers.
Also note that there is no significant advantage in beating the SLA requirement because end-user
experience is either satisfactory or it is not. For example, if the SLA calls for latency of no more than
100 µsec with 3-sigma at 1 msec, then a Memcached cluster achieving 50 µsec with 3-sigma at 500 µsec
actually wastes money; the datacenter could improve TCO by cutting the provisioning to run closer to
the requirement.
With all of these performance considerations in mind, the following sections provide additional detail
regarding the configuration of two different kinds of Memcached clusters, one using Intel Atom™-based
microservers and one using Xeon®-based dual-socket servers.
4.4 Server Hardware Configurations
Scenario 1: High SLA requirements/low tolerance for latency
This approach uses Intel Xeon® dual-socket E5-based servers with 10Gbps network interfaces, adequate
RAM for the size of the data store in question, and a full complement of security and manageability
solutions.
Scenario 2: Relatively high tolerance for latency and non-mission-critical peak throughput
This approach uses Intel Atom™-based microservers with 1Gbps network interfaces, and adequate RAM.
With Thermal Design Points (TDPs) as low as 6 Watts, Intel Atom Systems on a Chip (SoCs) can deliver
10. Copyright 2013 Intel Corporation – All Rights Reserved Page 10
substantial electrical power savings. That is especially important for cloud service provides who typically
find as much as 40 percent of their operating costs come from the electricity to power and cool their
data center infrastructures.
4.4.1 Memory Sizing
Memcached uses each server’s memory for its operations. All keys and values are stored in the servers’
DRAM. Therefore, choosing how much memory per server in the Memcached cluster depends on the
size of the data store planned by the system architect. For example, to support a distributed cache of
2GB, a cluster of four Memcached servers requires at least 500MB additional RAM per server, above and
beyond what’s required to run the Memcached servers, themselves.
4.4.2 Networking
As previously described, one of the most critical factors in Memcached performance is the network
latency, which makes it imperative to balance network throughput and server capacity. Because the
Memcached server constantly communicates with the client and the backend, adequate networking
infrastructure among all those components is crucial.
The optimization of networking technology involves not only the bandwidth of the network interface
(e.g., 10Gbps vs 1Gbps) but also the queue affinity between the processor and the network interface.
Queue affinity can best be achieved by using script-level control of multi-queue handling, spreading
requests between cores, controlling interrupts, thread migration control, etc. (See Section 4.5.2
Memcached Performance Tuning for more detail).
Bandwidth efficiency can generally be addressed by making network interface choices that properly
match to the Memcached server platform (see the following two sections on Intel Xeon- and Intel Atom-
based servers).
4.4.3 Intel Xeon-based Platforms
Per Scenario 1, to achieve best performance, a dual-socket Intel Xeon E5-based platform typically
requires a 10Gbps network interface. That ensures the server’s aggregate processing performance is
matched by the ability to handle and dispatch high numbers of requests. In addition, selecting a network
interface capable of multi-queue handling will ensure that Memcached requests are simultaneously
distributed across multiple network interface queues. Even though the use of a 1Gbps network interface
with an Intel Xeon platform is feasible, the performance observed is less than ideal because the
constrained bandwidth creates a latency bottleneck.
4.4.4 Intel Atom-based Platforms
Per Scenario 2, when using Atom-based microservers, the use of a 1Gbps network interface typically
achieves optimum performance. Our testing and real-world deployments show that using a faster
network interface does not significantly contribute to better performance for Memcached on Atom-
based platforms. Keeping in mind the need to match costs to SLA requirements, using a 1Gbps network
interface with Atom-based platforms is a cost-effective choice. However, even with that bandwidth, we
recommend using a network interface capable of multi-queue handling.
11. Copyright 2013 Intel Corporation – All Rights Reserved Page 11
4.5 Memcached Tuning and Optimization
4.5.1 Hardware and Software Optimization
For Intel Xeon platforms, Hyperthreading and Turbo Boost features should be enabled. Depending on
the type of Intel Atom platform used, similar features, when available, also should be enabled. This
helps the Memcached server use CPU core affinity to limit thread migration, a detriment to
performance. Similarly, BIOS Speed Step states, C States and EIST should be enabled in those systems
that support them. While Hyperthreading and Turbo Boost help with query performance, the
implementation of Speed Step and C States, along with EIST, helps optimize power efficiency and
improves overall TCO.
4.5.2 Memcached Performance Tuning
As previously described, Memcached clusters often exhibit a high load profile on a minority of CPUs,
while other CPUs sit idle. Therefore, the network interface needs to distribute requests across all
available CPUs running Memcached. Setting Interrupt Request (IRQ) affinity on the network interface
for each Memcached server insures that all CPUs are set to handle the requests.
Along with IRQ affinity, network interface interrupt coalescing enables best performance on both
processor classes. By observing soft IRQ handling, you can determine if the system spends more time
servicing interrupts than processing Memcached requests. One way to balance that is to throttle the
network interface. By tuning its “rx-usecs” parameter, you can increase Memcached server
performance.
For Intel Xeon platforms, you can start with the number of microseconds per interrupt (usually around
350), and then vary it to observe changes in performance. The Linux command to use is: ethtool
<nic_id> -C -rx-usecs 350.
In addition to network interface IRQ affinity and interrupt coalescing, thread affinity for the Memcached
server needs to be enabled. Thread affinity ensures that each Memcached thread is pinned to a given
CPU, and only to that CPU.
For certain versions of Memcached, such as 1.6BagLRU and 1.4.15-ThreadAffinity, you can set the CPU
affinity from the Memcached settings file. This typically consists of an incremental value set to an
integer, allowing the server to pin its threads to given CPUs according to the specified value. You can
use the “taskset” shell command in Linux to set CPU affinity for Memcached, as well. Note that the
value in question depends on the CPU layout of the platform, and it can vary from system to system,
even within the same processor class.
12. Copyright 2013 Intel Corporation – All Rights Reserved Page 12
5.0Summary
Memcached provides a performance boost for Web services because it caches data and objects in
memory to reduce the number of times that an external data source must be read. The Memcached tier
can cache “hot” data and reduce costly trips back to the database to read data from disk, thereby
providing a speed advantage and enabling Web services to respond quickly to fast trending demands.
Well-designed Memcached clusters can consistently support a transaction latency SLA in the 100 µsec
range while scaling to support very larger Web server farms. As data size increases, Memcached scales
smoothly by adding more RAM to a server and/or adding more servers to the network. Because all client
libraries use the same hashing algorithm to determine servers, any client can read other clients’ cached
data, which offers the advantage of peanut-buttering hot-trending values within the common cache
array and making them immediately available to any client upon request.
Intel has been a leading contributor to upstream open source projects and industry efforts to advance
Memcached performance, conducting extensive tests and proposing numerous optimizations for
Memcached on Intel Architecture. Through these efforts, we have identified three main considerations
impacting Memcached performance: 1) Hit-Rate, 2) cache request throughput, and 3) latency.
Two primary deployment scenarios require specific hardware approaches:
Scenario 1: High SLA requirements and low tolerance for latency
Using Intel Xeon® dual-socket E5-based servers with 10Gbps network interfaces, adequate RAM for the
size of the data store in question, and a full complement of security and manageability solutions.
Scenario 2: Relatively high tolerance for latency and non-mission-critical peak throughput
Using Intel Atom™-based microservers with 1Gbps network interfaces, and adequate RAM. Intel Atom
Systems on a Chip (SoCs) can deliver substantial electrical power and cost savings.
In both approaches, proper memory sizing is important because each server’s memory is used for the
key/value caching. The amount of memory per server depends on the total Memcached memory
designed by the system architect, divided by the number of servers plus the amount of memory needed
to run each server.
Networking is another key performance factor in both scenarios due to the critical impact of network
throughput on latency. Properly matching the network interface to the server is the first issue, with a
1Gbps interface generally adequate for the Intel Atom-based systems in Scenario 2 and a 10Gbps
interface better for the Intel Xeon-based systems in Scenario 1. Hyperthreading, Turbo Boost and
distributing requests through IRQ affinity tuning also are helpful to optimize performance.
Using Intel Architecture across the Web tier, cache tier and back-end tier reduces overall complexity and
improves TCO by providing a common hardware and software architecture that can be optimized for
performance, cost and maintainability for all functional levels throughout the data center.
13. Copyright 2013 Intel Corporation – All Rights Reserved Page 13
6.0Appendix A – Additional Resources
“Ways to Speed-Up Your Cloud Environment” blog post
“Enhancing the Scalability of Memcached” technical paper
P. Saab, "Scaling Memcached at Facebook," 12 December 2008. [Online]. Available:
https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=39391378919&ref=mf
Twitter Engineering, "Memcached SPOF Mystery," Twitter Engineering, 20 April 2010. [Online].
Available: http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/04/Memcached-spof-mystery.html
Reddit Admins, "reddit's May 2010 "State of the Servers" report," Reddit.com, 11 May 2011.
[Online]. Available: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/05/reddits-may-2010-state-of-servers.html
C. Do, "YouTube Scalability," Youtube / Google, Inc., 23 June 27. [Online]. Available:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW5_eEKEC28
Memcached.org, "Memcached- a distributed memory object caching system,"
Memcached.org, 2009. [Online]. Available: http://Memcached.org/about