STAC Report: kdb+ 3.2 with NVMe-based Intel SSDs on Lenovo System x3850 X6

Fastest kdb+ system in 7 of the 17 response-time benchmarks

22 January 2015

STAC has just released STAC-M3 results for a system consisting of kdb+ 3.2 on a Lenovo System x3850 X6 server with 9 x 1.6TB Intel SSD DC P3700 drives. This is similar to a test we published 9 months ago on the same type of system using Intel SSD DC S3700 drives. Unlike the S3700 drives, which used a SATA interface, the P3700s in this test used the relatively new NVM Express (NVMe) interface standard, utilizing drivers packaged with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6.

Compared to other STAC-M3 Benchmarks using kdb+, this SUT was:

• The fastest in 7 of the 17 response-time benchmarks
• 27%-97% faster than the next best performance in the month-, quarter-, and year-high-bid benchmarks (STAC-M3.ß1.1T.MOHIBID.TIME, STAC-M3.ß1.1T.QTRHIBID.TIME, STAC-M3.ß1.1T.YRHIBID.TIME)
• 86% faster than the next best performance in the market snapshot benchmark (STAC-M3.ß1.10T.MKTSNAP.TIME)

Click here for the STAC Report. At this link, qualified members of the STAC Benchmark Council can also access the configuration details for the stack that was tested.

Qualified members may also request to inspect or run the STAC-M3 Pack for kdb+ (the q and k code for the kdb+ implementation).

Intel also studied the effect of varying certain storage-related configuration parameters with this SSD-based system. There were significant effects (up to 2.5x). STAC wrote a Tech Note about these experiments in the STAC Vault. Qualified members may obtain the Tech Note at the link above.