In 2016 and beyond, infrastructure reliability is more essential than ever for business continuity. The overall health of network operations, applications, management and security functions all depend on the core foundational elements: server hardware, server operating systems and virtualization to deliver high availability, robust management and solid security. The reliability of the server, server OS and virtualization platforms are the cornerstones of the entire network infrastructure. The individual and collective reliability of these platforms have a direct, immediate and long lasting impact on daily operations and business results.

Since 2008, corporate enterprise users rated IBM server hardware as the most reliable platform, besting 14 server hardware and 11 different server hardware virtualization platforms. A 61% majority of IBM Power servers and Lenovo System x servers achieved “five nines” or 99.999% availability – the equivalent of 5.25 minutes of unplanned per server downtime compared to 46% of Hewlett-Packard servers and 40% of Oracle server hardware

Download the ITIC 2016 Global Server Hardware, Server OS Reliability Report

CentOS (from the CentOS Project) is available for POWER8 with both Big Endian and Little Endian support ! Starting with version 7 (1511), it can be downloaded from CentOS.org website and installed on POWER8 servers.

With the entire version ported to IBM POWER, all the tools and packages you are used to are available right away. While keeping the same look-and-feel and commands, it leverages the IBM Power Systems platform to provide extreme performance, higher levels of availability and increased flexibility.

Where?

http://mirror.centos.org/altarch/7/isos/

It is available in both Big and Little Endian environments 😉

New features in this release of IBM® PowerVM® V2.2.4 include support for the following:

• New NovaLink architecture for IBM POWER8® based systems, which allows for greater scalability for OpenStack cloud deployments
• New Virtual Network Interface Controller (vNIC), which enables improved efficiency, performance, and VM mobility for VMs with SRIOV adapters
• Live Partition Mobility improvements in resiliency, performance, and NPIV validation
• New features for Shared Storage Pool

New or improved features in this release of IBM PowerVC V1.3.0 include support for the following:

• New advanced policy-based management to automate the dynamic optimization of systems
• Exploitation of the PowerVM NovaLink architecture, which improves scaling and performance
• New storage management capabilities, including support for IBM DS8000® NPIV and vSCSI storage
• Support for PowerVM Multiple Shared Processor Pools

More info: http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=ca&infotype=an&supplier=897&letternum=ENUS215-262

Power8 ofrece la mejor relación entre coste y rendimiento, no hay rival para su bus interno, su ancho de banda entre procesador y memoria y los 8 hilos de cada uno de sus cores. Unos recientes “benchmarks” con MariaDB (heredera de MySQL) arrojan los siguientes resultados.

Detalles de las pruebas de rendimiento:

Fichero my.cnf

[mysqld]
max_connections = 400
table_open_cache = 800
query_cache_type = 0
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 512M
innodb_buffer_pool_instances = 10
innodb_adaptive_hash_index_partitions = 20


Comando sysbench lanzado:

sysbench-mariadb --test=lua/oltp.lua --oltp-tables-count=20 \
--oltp-table-size=50000 --num-threads=... --oltp-read-only=on \
--oltp-point-selects=1000 --oltp-distinct-ranges=0 \
--oltp-simple-ranges=0 --oltp-sum-ranges=0 --oltp-order-ranges=0 \
--max-time=100 --max-requests=0 run

SW & HW utilizado

Servidor IBM “Firestone” S822LC Power8 con 2 sockets, 20 cores y 8-way SMT (160 hardware threads). Usando PowerKVM 3.1 y virtualizado un Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS (ppc64le). Base de datos MariaDB-10.1.8 y sysbench-mariadb compilados localmente con IBM Advance Tool Chain 8.0Fuente (inglés): https://blog.mariadb.org/10-1-mio-qps/