April 12, 2007 at 5:09 am
I’m a BI developer and have a hardware question.
We have recently specked up some new servers for our datawarehouse and OLAP solution, we have opted to go 64bit. A consultancy suggested 4 dual core processors per box (around 3GHz Xeons) with 16gig ram. On presenting the consultants report to our hardware manager he has now kitted out the servers with 2 (1.6MHz) dual core Itanium2’s. Also, the boxes only have 2 sockets so there’s no room to expand in the future.
Without getting too caught up in what to do with the hardware manager what is the general consensus?
Generally speaking should 2 (1.6MHz 64bit) dual core Itanium2’s outperform 4 (3Ghz 64bit) dual core Xeons?
Any science or performance comparisons to demonstrate the case would be very much appreciated, mind you so would a yes or no.
April 12, 2007 at 7:52 am
There is a very simple answer Intel created Itanium specifically for the 64bits platform back in the early 2000 so given the choice between Itanium and improved Xeon choose Itanium. I was a volunteer for the SQL Server 64bits project which started in 2001. Hope this helps.
Kind regards,
Gift Peddie
April 12, 2007 at 9:04 am
I'm not so sure. During a presentation from MS a couple of weeks ago they said that Itanium are mostly preferrable on system with 8 or more CPU's.
On a system with less CPU's the XEON oreven Opterons provide better performance because of the higher clock speed. There are also some driver and application issues with Itanium systems. For example Visual Studion and thus BI Management studio doesn't work on Itanium. Not all datasources offer Itaniuim compatible drivers.
So in your case I would prefer the Xeon to the Itanium option.
If you give me your email I can send you the original presentation.
Markus
[font="Verdana"]Markus Bohse[/font]
April 12, 2007 at 9:13 am
Drivers are hardware manufacture related issues I have used HP Itanium boxes and don't have issues and VS2005 comes in 64bits edition. I run VS Team Suites BI Management Studio defaults to my Team Suites so BI Management Studio is really not used in development environments.
Kind regards,
Gift Peddie
April 12, 2007 at 11:15 am
[font="Verdana"]Markus Bohse[/font]
April 12, 2007 at 11:55 am
i would stay away from Itanium and just go x64 for 64 bit
April 14, 2007 at 3:07 pm
SQL Noob,
What makes you say that?
April 14, 2007 at 7:17 pm
My 2 cents on this
http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/7/a/47a548b9-249e-484c-abd7-29f31282b04d/RelDWPerf.doc
{
Hardware decisions often are made prematurely, before any significant knowledge of the system is known. This is particularly tricky when choosing hardware for a relational data warehouse that allows unbarred ad hoc access to its end users. It has become increasingly common for “super users” to have access to the warehouse to satisfy their reporting needs, as Information Technology departments are hard-pressed to keep up with the demand for new reporting and analysis requirements. The hardware platform needs to allow for this, to the extent possible.
The 64-bit platform provides many advantages to a data warehouses due to the extended memory architecture. A data warehouse that supports ad hoc querying requires sufficient memory to read gigabytes (GBs) and terabytes of data. The cost-effectiveness of the x64 platform has all but eliminated the consideration of 32-bit in server purchasing decisions. This is particularly true for a data warehouse because it stores and queries very large databases.
Even a 64-bit decision is complicated by the two high-level chip architectures—x64 and IA64 (Itanium). There are a few things to take into consideration when making this decision. x64 is fully supported in SQL Server 2005 and is an excellent option for data warehouses due to its cost efficiency. Currently, Itanium-based hardware provides more scalability but the x64 platform is quickly catching up. It is important to remember that Itanium is a completely different chip architecture that favors parallelism and improved computational logic, often found in data warehouses. Since both chip architectures are quickly evolving, it is best to study the current vendor offerings. A good indicator can be the TPC-H results posted on the TPC Web site (http://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_perf_results.asp). This is particularly informative when looking at the underlying database size, though that is not a pure indication of system size.
In addition to chip architecture, the number and speed of processors is important. Data warehouses require much number crunching and the need for parallelism, which is facilitated by both the number of processors and their clock speed. It can be difficult to estimate the actual requirements prior to implementing the data warehouse in production. A good approach is to not only establish a baseline to start with, but also to identify hardware and an architecture that can be scaled to more, faster processors in the future.
}
April 16, 2007 at 2:08 pm
I would go with 4 dual core Xeons because that gives you 8 simultaneous threads that can be chewing on data in the likely parallel operations that will be common in your OLAP queries. Make sure you get a very GOOD I/O subsystem regardless of which CPU architecture you choose. I/O will almost certainly be your bottleneck if you don't, and it is silly to spend a bundle on RAM and CPUs only to have a cheap drive system bring the system to a crawl.
Best,
Kevin G. Boles
SQL Server Consultant
SQL MVP 2007-2012
TheSQLGuru on googles mail service
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