Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Sets New Performance Records

Last month we announced some impressive performance achievements reached with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 in internal testing completed by Red Hat and Fusion-io’s engineering teams. Today, we’re excited to announce new performance records for Red Hat Enterprise Linux that showcase the platform’s ability to meet the needs of mission-critical applications crossing data warehousing, virtualization and large-scale I/O.

Red Hat, in partnership with HP and Ingres VectorWise, has set new performance and price/performance records for large-scale data warehousing using the industry-standard TPC-H benchmark. The benchmark realistically simulates very large data sets, measuring the ability to scale a workload efficiently across the system. It provides both a raw performance result and also a price/performance result that incorporates the total cost of the system under test. With the enhanced NUMA awareness capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the test system, a 12-core HP ProLiant DL380 G7, achieved the lowest price/performance and highest performance results among the TPC-H results published to date, at the 100GB database size, in combination with Ingres VectorWise 1.5. These results can be viewed at http://tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_perf_results.asp and http://tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_price_perf_results.asp.

In addition, Red Hat Enterprise Linux features strongly in SPECvirt benchmarks. SPECvirt is a new industry-standard benchmark, developed by a consortium of leading virtualization vendors, which measures the ability of a system to host virtual machines that are running a set of typical server applications. Of the ten currently published results, all use Red Hat Enterprise Linux exclusively as the Virtual Machine (guest) operating system, while five also use it as the hypervisor host. Using SPECvirt, Red Hat is the only vendor to have demonstrated virtualization on a large 64-core, 2Tbyte system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has proven itself as a leading virtualization host and guest, offering outstanding consolidation and performance results.*

Additionally, in a collaboration between Red Hat and Fusion-io, internal testing by the companies' engineering teams recently raised the bar in I/O throughput on Solid State Disks. Using the most recent updates to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, over 1.4 million I/O operations per second and a sustained throughput of 11.2GB per second were achieved for an 8KB transfer size, figures that are approximately 6.5% higher than the initial version 6 release. Random I/O operations were used to simulate a workload of large-volume data searches and cover a broad range of use cases.

Tyler Smith, Fusion-io Vice President of Alliances said this about the results:

“Storage memory technologies, such as NAND flash ioMemory products from Fusion-io, can be installed on industry-standard servers and appear to applications as block storage. This new memory tier moves process-critical, or active data onto the server and closer to the CPU. Working together, Red Hat and Fusion-io have integrated our hardware and software to optimize performance across a broad ecosystem of applications.”

Terry Garnett, CEO, Ingres Corp. said:

“These TPC-H results prove that Ingres VectorWise and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 are the epitome of lightning-fast computing for speed-of-thought analysis. For organizations that rely on the manipulation of large data-sets to make business decisions, the flexibility of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, underpinned by the revolutionary technology of VectorWise, provides previously unseen performance gains and true competitive advantage.”

For more information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, visit www.redhat.com/rhel.

*SPEC™, SPECvirt™, and SPECvirt_sc™ are trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC). These statements reflect results published on www.spec.org as of April 4, 2011. For the latest SPECvirt_sc2010 results visit http://www.spec.org/osg/virt_sc2010.