STAC Report: kdb+ 3.6 with Dell EMC PowerScale F200 under STAC-M3 (tick analytics)

NFS-based solution with inline compression sets storage efficiency record

15 October 2020

STAC recently performed STAC-M3 Benchmarks on a stack involving the kdb+ 3.6 database system with a Dell EMC PowerScale F200 All-Flash Scale-Out NAS cluster. The results are available here.

STAC-M3 is the set of industry standard enterprise tick-analytics benchmarks for database software/ hardware stacks that manage large time series of market data ("tick data"). In this project, we ran the baseline benchmark suite (code named Antuco).

The stack under test was Kx's kdb+ 3.6 DBMS distributed across 9 Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 servers sharing a 3-node Dell EMC PowerScale F200 All-Flash Scale-Out NAS cluster. Dell EMC chose to highlight that this solution involving 9 database servers accessing networked flash storage was/had:

• Faster than a solution using Dell EMC’s larger flash storage appliance (SUT ID KDB190430) in 2 of 17 mean-response time STAC-M3 Antuco benchmarks, including:
  • 77% faster in the single-user VWAB operation (STAC-M3.v1.1T.VWAB-D.TIME)
  • 33% faster in the 10-user market snapshot operation (STAC-M3.β1.10T.MKTSNAP.TIME)
• 7.7x the speed of a solution involving a parallel file system with 14 database servers and 18 storage servers (KDB200401) in the single-user NBBO operation (STAC-M3.β1.1T.NBBO.TIME)
  
  
• Highest storage efficiency of any publicly reported solution involving kdb+ 3.6 (least storage used for the same database size)
• 166% for this SUT vs 149% for all others (STAC-M3.v1.1.STORAGE.EFF)

Details are in the STAC Report at the link above. Premium subscribers have access to the code used in this project and the micro-detailed configuration information for the solution. (To learn about subscription options, please contact us.)