The document discusses IBM's pureScale technology which allows DB2 databases to scale up to 128 nodes for high availability and scalability. PureScale forms a shared-disk cluster and uses proven "data sharing" technology from DB2 for z/OS. It provides agility to rapidly scale up or down capacity as needed with little application change. The company Triton built a basic 2-node pureScale cluster within a budget of under £1K to validate IBM's claims and gain hands-on experience. Their testing showed the cluster delivered 1000 transactions per second under load. The summary concludes that pureScale provides robust clustering with excellent price/performance.

1. The Information Management Specialists
Pure Genius: How To Get
Mainframe-Like Scalability &
Availability For Midrange DB2
James Gill & Julian Stuhler
UKCMG Forum 2010

2. The Information Management Specialists
Why pureScale?
• Agility
 Almost every business has major workload spikes, with
significant unused capacity at other times
 Need to be able to rapidly scale up/down in a cost effective way,
with little or no change needed to the application
• Availability
 Any system outage has direct impact on profitability and
customer retention
 Serving multiple geographies makes planned downtime more
difficult

3. The Information Management Specialists
What is pureScale?
• Optional feature for DB2 for Linux, UNIX and
Windows
 Current support is for AIX on System p and
SUSE Linux on selected IBM System x servers
only
• Implements a shared-disk clustering solution
to support high scalability and availability
 Up to 128 members in initial release
• Based on proven “data sharing” technology
used in DB2 for z/OS for past 15 years
• Capacity-based charging model allows
cluster to be easily expanded/contracted
• Little or no application change required

4. The Information Management Specialists
pureScale Scalability
1
1.98
3.9
7.6
10.4
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
Throughputv1Member
Number of pureScale Members
Source: Internal IBM Lab Tests

5. The Information Management Specialists
Triton’s Commodity Cluster
• Objectives
 Undertake basic validation of IBM’s performance &
scalability claims
 Build technical experience in a pureScale environment
and establish platform for ongoing R&D
 Assist IBM with early beta testing
• Constraints
 Budget < £1K
 Easily portable for customer demos etc.

6. The Information Management Specialists
Triton’s Commodity Cluster
• 2 member nodes and one CF
• Each node:
 Intel D510M0 (Dual core 1GHz Atom)
 4GB RAM
 40GB SDD
• Shared disk
 iSCSI 1TB (QNAP TS110)
• DB2 9.8 pureScale FP2 development image
• Technology Explorer used for workload and monitoring
 www.sourceforge.net/projects/db2mc

7. The Information Management Specialists
Triton pureScale Experiences
• Installation experiences
 SLES 10 requires
► compat-libstdc++-5.0.7-22.2.x86_64.rpm
 db2cluster resolves iSCSI mount issues
 Ensure FQDN names in /etc/hosts
 Very slick considering the component count

8. The Information Management Specialists
Triton pureScale Experiences
• Performance
 Technology Explorer
► WMD Java workload driver (WLB enabled)
► 2.5M row table
► Vanilla installation
► 32 threads, 25ms think time
 Delivered 1000tps @ 95%CPU load

9. The Information Management Specialists
pureScale Summary
• Robust clustering technology based on a proven
architecture
 Scalability
 Resilience
• Excellent price/performance characteristics
• Initial customer implementations are under way
• What are you waiting for?

10. The Information Management Specialists
Feedback / Questions
James Gill – james.gill@triton.co.uk
Julian Stuhler – julian.stuhler@triton.co.uk
www.triton.co.uk