Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage

This may be one of the quickest follow-ups to one of my own posts. I just saw an IBM blogger’s tongue-in-cheek post about the World-Record Oracle Database 11g TPC-H result. The post reads:

Yesterday, for the very first time, I went to Costco.

Now for those of you who live on Mars, Costco is one of those big warehouse type member only stores. You can get almost anything there but can never be sure exactly what will be there. I ended up with two of the biggest cans of tuna I have ever seen, a jar of Kalamata olives as big as a fishbowl, and enough toilet paper for a year.

Which reminded me of yesterday’s new TPC-H BI result from HP. HP now leads in the 1000GB space here – by using 64 servers with 512 cores. And 6 humongously specialized storage devices.(1)

It’s fun to think about the floor space, energy, and resources to manage that infrastructure. At least the toilet paper can go in the basement.

I got a chuckle out of that post and would have just commented on the blog, but there was some sort of login credential required to comment.

So What is My Comment?
Well, according to the blog header, the blogger who posted this humorous bit is Chief Technical Strategist, Performance Marketing for the IBM Systems and Technology Group. I think since a professional holding such a position as this seems to have missed a couple of critical points, I thought I’d point out a couple of things.

The blogger referred to the 6 HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server cells as “humongously specialized storage devices.” Yes, Exadata is humongously, enormously, gigantically, immensely, vastly, colossally specialized. However, the blogger moved on to insinuate there would be floor space issues with such a beast.

In case anyone else missed the point, this was 4 10U HP BladeSystem C7000 enclosures. That’s 40U. The humongously specialized, but minimally sized, storage devices were 6 2U HP Oracle Exadata Storage Servers. Sure, there were a couple of switches and some other such supporting gear, but, honestly, is it that “fun to think about” the floor space required for 52U worth of kit?  🙂