Compaq ProLiant CL1850 ServerNet II SAN Interconnect for Scalable Computing Cl - Page 5

WHITE PAPER (cont.) Doc Number TC000602WP ... ServerNet II SAN Technology Improves the Response of Clusters ERP and database applications usually operate efficiently if powerful CPUs and large memory resources are available to them. Distributed ERP applications accommodate more users (scale) by adding applications servers (Figure 1), which increases the need for SQL services from the database. Overall system performance depends upon the ability to keep the database busy. However, extreme software overhead generated by traditional network technologies forces the database to let the operating system functions and heavy communication protocols use a substantial portion of the CPU resources. With ServerNet II, database CPU utilization increases more than three times that of gigabit Ethernet and TCP/IP with the messaging loads just described. Published benchmark results demonstrate the value of ServerNet II SAN technology by increasing the number of SAP SD users supported by the system by more than 30 percent. Parallel relational database architectures rely on clustering multiple nodes to support very large databases and increase database availability. Queries, updates, and utility functions are distributed across multiple servers within a database cluster to maximize parallelism and to reduce the impact of a failure. Parallel relational databases rely on message systems to distribute processes, data, and database control information to database instances within the cluster. Parallel databases demand more than CPU efficiencies from the messaging system. Low message latency allows faster synchronization of parallel operations, which results in lower response times to user queries. CPU utilization and latency measurements with ServerNet II messaging show a three-fold improvement over gigabit Ethernet and TCP/IP with the messaging loads just described. Published database benchmark results demonstrate the value of SAN technology and efficient messaging to the database cluster system. COMPAQ SERVERNET II TECHNOLOGY Compaq enterprise servers have long used ServerNet SAN technology to provide systems with superior scalability, availability, and flexibility. ServerNet is the internal cluster interconnect within several Compaq NonStop products. Compaq Himalaya systems with ServerNet SAN messaging provide NonStop transaction services to Automatic Teller Machines, Stock Exchanges and credit card processing for most financial communities and consumers worldwide. Compaq Integrity products use ServerNet to achieve superior Unix availability to the telecommunications industry. NonStop Cluster products based upon Compaq ProLiant servers and the SCO operating system rely upon ServerNet for superior scalability and availability features. ProLiant Parallel Database clusters use ServerNet for scalability. The Compaq ServerNet II SAN interconnect is the most complete industry-standard implementation of the VI Architecture specification. Compaq ServerNet II is a low-latency, distributed memory fabric that uses low-cost, industry-standard components to provide highly reliable server-to-server communication. ServerNet II technology leverages several features of the VI Architecture that allow distributed applications to operate independent of the operating system and avoid unnecessary CPU interrupts. CPU utilization measurements of small message (64 bytes) latency show that ServerNet II messaging delivers over three times the performance of gigabit Ethernet and TCP/IP. Because of this high-performance, ServerNet II SAN configurations can scale to tens of servers within a cluster. 5