N-Class earns HP’s tout at Symposium

Server’s speed the focus of performance talk

HP’s top 3000 performance engineer offered a deal to customers at the Interex Solution Symposium which has a distinctly limited term. A little more than six months before HP would end its sales of the HP 3000, Kevin Cooper presented reasons why those customers should buy the computer’s newest models. His talk started with a sales pitch for a product that HP will cease selling in November.

“We’re having a close-out special now,” Cooper said while describing the latest performance advances for the N-Class HP 3000s. The head of HP’s performance efforts for the business server then added with a wry grin, “You can call me directly.”

HP is certain to end its sales of the systems on Oct. 31, moving on to sell processors, memory cards, IO cards and peripherals for the computers. But until that day arrives, the company intends to paint an inspiring picture about performance for its N-Class servers. A rumor about HP 3000 sales was circulating at the California symposium that HP had already reached 137 percent of its sales quota on the systems. If true, the number indicates that 3000 customers are stocking up on a product at the end of its life.

Cooper presented examples of why performance-hungry sites — or those who haven’t refreshed their system in a long time — will be buying the N-Class. The stories also showed how much performance room to grow can be found in the larger N-Class servers. Other systems, like the A-Class and smaller N-Class, are performance-limited, Cooper said, to create product price points in the 3000 lineup.

The reports described two customers’ performance benchmarks using the largest of the N-Class computers, 750-Mhz 4-processor models loaded with 10Gb of memory and using data from HP’s XP128 Fiber Channel disk arrays. One system was benchmarked with 600Gb of data balanced across four Fiber Channel cards. Data throughput had a major impact on the performance improvement from the customers’ prior systems, Series 997 8-way servers.

“The amazing thing to me is that I thought we’d tested Fiber Channel, but I’d never seen anything like this,” Cooper said. The unnamed customer — HP rarely shares the identity of such performance examples — had simulated three hours of intensive processing. HP’s labs reduced that time to 65 minutes, Cooper said, using the N-Class server.

“This was a huge mix of batch, OLTP, everything,” Cooper said, “and we basically gave them three times the performance. When I run transaction benchmarks I watch checkpoints, and I’m usually happy if the checkpoint is doing a few hundred IOs a second, and the drives are in the 30-60 range. The checkpoints were posting between 3,000 and 5,000 disk IOs a second, and individual drives posting up to 500 IOs a second. What that told me is that we had never even begun to stress-test our IO.”

Cooper said that using the XP128 array’s cache made the boost in IOs possible, “since the entire checkpoint is able to fit into the cache. The 3000 is sending what it thinks is a disk IO, but it’s really sending it to another computer out there, the XP128, which says, ‘I’ll take it.’’

The improvement in performance led the customer to cut a PO for the system, Cooper said. After he described this success for the HP 3000 Cooper fielded a question from the Symposium crowd which asked, “What platform are you having this customer migrate to?”

Cooper paused, then said, “The implication of your question is that we are in control.” When the laughter in the room died down, he added, “A few years ago the customer had selected one of our competitors to replace this application. They spent the usual multi-millions to do that, and sometime last September they booted that company out and called us back.”

The HP engineer did add that “realistically, this is the kind of application that HP-UX can handle these days, with a 64-way Superdome running 875Mhz processors. The question is getting the application migrated, because a relational database will take more.” The customer’s application is highly tuned for IMAGE/

SQL, Cooper explained. The customer wants “to breathe a little” before making their next move with the system, he said.

Beating the dawn

Another example in Cooper’s talk covered the “Nightly Race to Dawn” at a site with heavy batch operations — more than 50 pages of one-line Maestro scheduling jobs each evening. That workload was leaving the company unable to let users log on until 10:30 each morning, a situation the N-Class server was auditioned to resolve.

This customer benchmark used 400Gb of data, with several bottlenecks of jobs running single-threaded during the night. HP replicated the batch workload and reduced the clock time required from 12 hours of to 3 hours. “This will allow them to do $3 million a month in extra business,” Cooper said. “Going to the N-Class with the native Fiber Channel made that possible.”

A significant part of the customer’s batch operations included nightly system backup, a process driven by HP’s TurboStore product. Cooper admitted that TurboStore’s slower performance was mitigated by the IO processing speed of the N-Class.

“TurboStore is a very reliable product, but it’s never going to win the performance race among the backup products,” Cooper said. Using DLT 8000s connected via SCSI interfaces, as well as fine-tuning compression options, HP was able to drive those tape systems at their rated speed, something “we were never able to do before with TurboStore.”