STAC Report: kdb+ 4.0 with Pure FlashBlade//S500 under STAC-M3 (tick analytics)

Pure Storage pits a FlashBlade solution against competitive on-prem and cloud solutions

18 January 2024

STAC recently performed the first baseline and scaling STAC-M3™ Benchmarks on a stack involving Pure Storage®. The stack was KX's kdb+ 4.0 DBMS using NFS version 3 to access 266TiB of total usable storage on a Pure Storage FlashBlade//S500 with Purity//FB 4.1.5 and 10 x Pure Storage FlashBlades. The kdb+ software was distributed across 8 Dell PowerEdge R740xd servers, each with 2 x Intel Xeon Platinum 8260 CPUs and 256GiB of memory. The solution used Compatibility Rev I of the STAC-M3 Pack for kdb+ (benchmark implementation code).

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) and the optional scaling suite (code named Kanaga).

Pure Storage chose to highlight that this solution involving 8 database servers accessing a Pure Storage FlashBlade//S500 via NFSv3 and using Compatibility Rev I of the kdb+ STAC Pack:

• Was faster than a solution involving the same number of database servers, 3 network attached flash storage nodes, and Compatibility Rev H of the STAC Pack (KDB220506) in:
• 13 of 17 Antuco mean-response time benchmarks, including:
• 7x speedup in 10-user theoretical P&L
  (STAC-M3.β1.10T.THEOPL.TIME)
• 5.8x speedup in 10-user market snapshot
  (STAC-M3.β1.10T.MKTSNAP.TIME)
• 17 of 24 Kanaga mean-response time benchmarks, including:
• 1.3 – 1.5x speedup in 50-user 12-day VWAB
  (STAC-M3.β1.50T.YR{1,2,3,4,5}VWAB-12D-HO.TIME)
• 1.2 – 1.4x speedup in 1-user year high bid
  (STAC-M3.β1.1T.{2,3,4,5}YRHIBID.TIME)
• Was faster than a cloud-based solution using 15 database VM instances accessing data distributed across 40 VM instances, using Compatibility Rev E of the STAC Pack (KDB210507) in:
• 9 of 17 Antuco mean-response time benchmarks, including:
• 11x speedup in 10-user market snapshot
  (STAC-M3.β1.10T.MKTSNAP.TIME)
• 8.4x speedup in 10-user volume curve
  (STAC-M3.β1.10T.VOLCURV.TIME)
• 12 of 24 Kanaga mean-response time benchmarks, including:
• 4.4 – 5.3x speedup in 10-user market snapshots
  (STAC-M3.β1.10T.YR{2,3,4,5}-MKTSNAP.TIME)

For details, please see the report at the link above. Premium subscribers have access to the code used in this project as well as the micro-detailed configuration information for the solution. To learn about subscription options, please contact us.