HP, Red Brick Scale to More Than a Terabyte
with 600 Concurrent Users in Real-World Retail Benchmark
ACTION ITEMS
Hewlett-Packard Company and Red Brick Systems, Inc. have announced their strongest benchmark results ever in a proof-of-performance and scalability (POPS) test. In a benchmark designed to simulate a real-world retail environment, Red Brick Warehouse 5.1 and an HP 9000 V2200 Enterprise Server running the HP-UX 11 operating environment successfully loaded, queried and scaled a data warehouse to more than 1 terabyte of raw data with 600 concurrent users. (HP-UX Release 10.20 and later and HP-UX Release 11.00 and later, in both 32 and 64-bit configurations, on all HP 9000 computers are Open Group UNIX 9 branded products.) These results demonstrate that this system offers outstanding performance for large-scale data warehousing.
"Information is the most precious resource a business has," said Janice Chaffin, general manager of HP's High Performance Systems Division. "That's why we're so focused on developing solutions that enable our customers to access, understand and use their information as a competitive differentiator. Red Brick is a leader in business-critical data warehousing, and HP's position as the most popular and scalable Red Brick platform provides customers with an IT solution that helps them maximize the value of their business information."
"Scalability is key for today's information-hungry businesses," said Paul Rodwick, vice president of marketing at Red Brick. "We're very pleased to see these results reflect Red Brick and HP's ability to scale beyond a terabyte in raw data and also to support up to 600 concurrent users with consistently excellent query response times. This means that our mutual customers will get maximum performance today from a system that will continue to support their needs as their businesses grow."
POPS Benchmark Details
The POPS benchmark test was built on the following three criteria:
The benchmark was carefully constructed to provide a realistic retail environment that included 63 grocery stores, more than 19,000 products, roughly 12 million transactions per day and 35 ongoing sales promotions. The data warehouse included two fact tables (daily forecasts and daily sales) and five dimension tables (customer, period, product, promotion and store).
Loading data into a data warehouse is one of the most critical success factors for any data warehouse. Loading consists of data cleansing, index building, referential integrity checking and aggregation updating. Using one administrator, the Red Brick and HP solution was able to load more than 1 terabyte of raw data and make it query-ready in 10 days. The largest table, 7.7 billion rows and just over 1 terabyte in size, loaded at approximately 6.1GB per hour.
The queries required the system to access detailed data and return results repeatedly, in an ad hoc fashion. The benchmark applied 10 queries simultaneously, multiple times, to test query performance and user scalability. The benchmark results revealed that query performance and system utilization remained consistently excellent as users increased.
Data-Warehouse Specifications
Red Brick Warehouse 5.1 features a high-performance loader, self-tuning, query parallelism and an industry-leading family of join technologies. The HP 9000 V2200, featuring 16 200MHz, 64-bit, PA-8200 CPUs, worked in conjunction with two EMC Symmetrix 3700 Enterprise Storage systems. The server was configured with 16GB of memory; total mirrored storage capacity of the EMC Symmetrix systems was 5.8TB; and 1.5TB of disk space was used.
Information about Red Brick is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.redbrick.com Hewlett-Packard Company is a leading global provider of computing, Internet and intranet solutions, services, communications products and measurement solutions. HP has 127,200 employees and had revenue of $42.9 billion in its 1997 fiscal year.