SQL Server 2012 Fast Track Data Warehouse for Huawei White Paper

Microsoft Fast Track Data Warehouse Reference Architecture for Huawei

1. Executive summary

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Fast Track Data Warehouse (FTDW) Reference Architecture from Huawei enables IT architects and managers to build optimized data warehouse solutions with tested and tuned server, storage, network, and software configurations. The reference architectures present implementation guidelines and best practices for a variety of data warehouse configurations. This approach significantly reduces time of deployment, service and costs while maximizing performance and reliability.

Leveraging decades of experiences in producing mission critical Information and Communication Technology systems, Huaweis enterprise class servers, storage and networking products form a solid foundation for deploying enterprise critical IT services such as data warehouses and business analytics.

IT managers, database architects, CXOs interested to explore and deploy data warehouses and BI applications could take advantage of Huaweis engineering, integration and optimization effort to build their next data warehouses.

Proven Configurations: Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Fast Track Data Warehouse Reference Architectures from Huawei documents the design, components, settings, and best practice to deploy a Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Fast Track Data Warehouse. Users can now procure the exact configuration of hardware and software and turn on new data warehouse services in the shortest amount of time, with minimal risk.

Performance: The Reference Architectures provide the best practice implementation that has been tested and tuned to deliver best performance. It also provides database management suggestions to keep the data warehouse at its best performance level.

Costs: The Reference Architectures design has taken considerations of selecting the right hardware components to maximize performance while keeping costs low.

Three configurations are included in this Reference Architectures document covering a broad range of capacity and performance requirements.

enterprise.huawei.com Published 1/11/2013 Page 1 of 21


2. Fast Track Reference Architecture Overview

This document focuses on the system level implementation of Microsoft SQL 2012 Fast Track Data Warehouse built on top of Huawei Tecal 2288 v2 Enterprise Servers. A summary of key Microsoft SQL Server parameters will also be provided. This document intends to complement Microsoft Fast Track Data Warehouse Reference Guide for SQL Server 2012.

Workload Assumptions

The Microsoft SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse for Huawei reference architectures described in this document target scan-intensive, large-request, analytical data warehousing workloads. Contrary to OLTP databases, this type of data warehouse workloads typically involve much larger data requests and benefit from the increased total throughput potential of sequential disk scans. With Fast Track data warehousing workloads an emphasis is placed on achieving consistently high I/O scan rates (measured in MB/s) rather than the more traditional focus on operations per second (measured in IOPS).

In order to enable data warehouses to support large volumes of data and wide-range of queries, traditional use-case specific optimizations will only work to a certain extent but very often increase complexity, costs, maintenance overhead and perhaps even reduce performance. Fast Track Data Warehouse is a different way of optimizing for data warehouse workloads. By aligning database files and configuration with efficient disk scan (rather than seek) access, performance achieved from individual disks can be significantly higher. The resultant per-disk performance increase reduces the number of disks needed to generate sufficient I/O throughput to satisfy the ability of SQL Server to process data for a given workload. Furthermore, you can avoid some index-based optimization techniques used to improve disk seek.



FTDW Reference Architecture Components Overview

Figure 1 Huawei Tecal RH2288 V2 Rack Server Tecal RH2288 V2 rack server is an enterprise class 2U rack server that is designed to provide best performance and scalability in its class of servers. The RH2288 V2 can support up to 16 computing cores, a memory capacity of 768 GB, and a storage capacity of 24 TB. The RH2288 V2 is an ideal product for mission critical enterprise applications.

High-performance that can scale

The RH2288 V2 uses the latest Intel Xeon E5-2600 series central processing units (CPUs). This CPU based on a new architecture has up to eight cores, 20 MB L3 caching, QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) in 8 GT per second, and power management to improve performance while reducing power consumption.

The RH2288 V2 has 24 dual in-line memory modules (DIMMs) for memory expansion. The RH2288 V2 uses the 2H DDR3 memory technology that supports up to 768 GB of memory.

The RH2288 V2 supports the Huawei ES series peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) expansion card for solid state disks (SSDs) to provide the input/output (I/O) performance that can resolve the I/O bottlenecks of hard disks.

Power consumption control feature that improves the power efficiency

The RH2288 V2 has excellent power efficiency that meets the 80 PLUS GOLD standard and the Energy Star standard. Like all the other Huawei servers, the RH2288 V2 obtains the China Energy Conservation and Environmentally-Friendly Certification.

The RH2288 V2 supports 460 W or 800 W right-sized power supply units for optimal power efficiency.


Microsoft Fast Track Data Warehouse Reference Architecture for Huawei The RH2288 V2 has multiple sensors at strategic internal locations that monitor the temperature of key components and send the data to the basic input output system (BIOS) to dynamically adjust the fan speed to cool the server precisely. This ensures that the server runs reliably while consuming a minimum level of power.

The dynamic configuration technology on maximum power can limit the power of the data center server within a preset range, without affecting the performance of the server.

Simple management and maintenance

The RH2288 V2 uses the fault recording technology that is similar to the black boxes of airplanes to record a fault quickly when the system breaks down unexpectedly.

The RH2288 V2 has an independent baseboard management controller (BMC) to provide the comprehensive and high-performance remote control.

Figure 2 Huawei Tecal ES3000 PCIe SSD Card Huawei Tecal ES3000 High Performance PCIe SSD Card is a Full-Height Half-Length PCIe card that delivers maximum read IOPS Performance of 600K@4KB and maximum write IOPS Performance of 220K@4KB. Huawei FTDW configurations based on Huawei Tecal ES3000 significantly improve IOPS and reduce latency as compared to HDD based solutions.



Turbo-charged FTDW Performance

Small size: Full-Height Half-Length

Large capacity: 800GB, 1.2TB, 2.4TB

High bandwidth: PCIe 2.0 x8 interface, up to 3.0GBps bandwidth

High IOPS: random read 600K@4kB, random write 220K@4kB

Low latency: 13us

Industry-leading Reliability

Power-down Protection to ensure data Integrity

Embedded ECC engine and RAID5 engine combine to two-dimensional error detection/correction mechanism

Embedded DATA Scrubbing engine prevent the data errors in advance

Dynamic RAID algorithm used in all the channels, to share resources, and keep the reliability with the multiple chip failure

Support TRIM & sophisticated wear algorithms, to enhance the recovery efficiency, reduce the write wear, extend service life

Easy to Maintain

Support online upgrade to meet the customized needs

Integrated querying & management tool: provide querying the type/capacity/version/wear/bad block information of SSD device

Log function: record the key events

Support SNMP protocol for unified management system

With solid state storage for user data, the FTDW reference architectures have many more advantages besides higher performance, including simplified management, I/O resiliency, and lower operational cost.

Simplified Management: The IO throughput of solid state storage is not as sensitive to sequential or random I/O patterns as its spinning disk counterparts, and FTDW built upon solid


Microsoft Fast Track Data Warehouse Reference Architecture for Huawei state storage does not require fragmentation management. The complex steps in the DW load process that often involves single threaded loading to avoid page fragmentation can be simplified, and this will bring customers faster DW load time.

In addition, larger disk groups and lower volume counts can be used to achieve a given throughput target, which further simples DW management in terms of filegroup creation and maintenance.

I/O Resiliency: With its exceptional random I/O performance, solid state storage has minimal performance degradation under high concurrency (large user numbers) or page fragmentation. Mixed random read (seek) workload does not negatively impact large request (scan) I/O patterns. It enables real-time DW updates while the DW is in use with minimum query response time degradation.

Lower Operational Cost: Less management efforts outlined above translates into lower operational cost. Additionally, solid state storage offers a more efficient balance of I/O throughput to capacity per unit. Usually fewer SSDs are required to achieve a given DW throughput target when compared with HDDs, which reduces the power consumption, generates less heat (thus less HVAC capacity), and often supports higher density solutions.

More about solid state storage in FTDW including configuration guidelines can be found in Microsoft Fast Track DW Reference Guide for SQL Server 2012 at

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh918452.aspx.



3. Huawei FTDW Reference Architectures

Huawei currently offers three FTDW reference architectures for SQL Server 2012. All of the configurations are based on Huawei Tecal 2288 v2 server introduced in the previous section. Each configuration accommodates varying storage capacity and data warehouse (DW) throughput. The first configuration is equipped with all enterprise class SAS HDDs delivering optimized $/GB, and the base configuration has 5TB Fast Track rated capacity. The second configuration delivers 4TB Fast Track rated capacity using one PCIe SSD card for the DW storage. There is an option for doubling the PCIe SSD cards to achieve higher level of data redundancy. The third configuration supports 10TB Fast Track rated capacity with two PCIe SSD cards. The PCIe SSD-based systems deliver optimized $/DW throughput.

3.1 Cost Optimized Configuration with SAS HDD

The following diagram shows the FTDW configuration with SAS HDDs for user data storage.

Figure 3 Huawei 5TB FTDW RA with SAS HDDs


Microsoft Fast Track Data Warehouse Reference Architecture for Huawei The following table provides details of the hardware configuration.

Table 1 Hardware Configuration of Huawei 5TB FTDW RA w/ SAS HDD

Components Descriptions

Server Tecal 2288 V2

CPU 1x Intel Xeon E5-2643, 3.3GHz, 4 cores per socket, 4 cores total

Memory 96GB DRAM (4x 16GB DDR3 DIMMs and 4x 8GB DDR3 DIMMs @ 1600MHz)

Internal Hard Drives 2x 600GB 10K 2.5 SAS HDD (OS/SQL Server) Rear Bay

18x 300GB 10K 2.5 SAS HDD (User Data)

4x 300GB 10K 2.5 SAS HDD (Logs)

2x 600GB 10K 2.5 SAS HDD (Hot Spare)

RAID Controller Huawei SR620 with BBU

Operating System Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Enterprise Edition

Database Software Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition

RAID Configuration

Huawei SR620 is an enterprise-class RAID controller that provides disk management capabilities, high-availability, as well as improved storage performance. The RAID configurations play an important role of the data warehouse performance, and the following shows how the disk drives are configured in Huawei 5TB FTDW RA.

18x 300GB disks for user data and TempDB: Nine RAID 1 groups are created, and each configured with a single virtual disk.

4x 300GB disks for database logs: One RAID 10 group is created and configured with a single



virtual disk.

2x 600GB disks for Windows Server and SQL server: One RAID 1 group is created and configured with a single virtual disk for OS and software installation.

Two additional 600GB disks are reserved as hot spare to further improve system availability.

Stripe Element Size Huawei SR620 creates RAID groups with a default stripe element size (strip size) of 64KB. In the Fast Track validation testing, 256KB stripe element size was used. Huawei recommends testing various stripe element sizes depending on the workload characteristics of customers application.

3.2 Performance Optimized Configurations with PCIe SSD

To significantly boost I/O performance, PCIe SSD cards can be used as database storage. Each Huawei ES3000 series of PCIe SSD cards offer up to 2.4TB storage capacity per card while delivering super-high IOPS that significantly speeds up throughput and response time of the data warehouses.

The following diagrams describe the high level architecture of the PCIe SSD based FTDW configurations. A system with one 2.4TB PCIe SSD card provides 4TB of Fast Track rated capacity. A second 2.4TB PCIe SSD card can be added to mirror (RAID 1) the original PCIe SSD card for high availability.

4TB PCIe SSD Based FTDW RA



Figure 4 Huawei 4TB FTDW RA with One PCIe SSD

The following table provides details of the hardware configuration.

Table 2 Hardware Configuration of Huawei 4TB FTDW RA w/ One PCIe SSD




Memory 64GB DRAM (4x 16GB DDR3 DIMMs @ 1600MT/s)

Internal Storage 1x 2.4TB ES3000 PCIe SSD (User Data)

2x 600GB 10K 2.5 SAS HDD (OS/SQL Server) Rear Bay





HBA Huawei SR120



Huawei ES3000 PCIe SSD card exhibits industry-leading reliability with features including embedded ECC engine and RAID5 engine combined to provide two-dimensional error detection/correction mechanism. However, for customers who are accustomed to traditional RAID protection, a second PCIe SSD card can be added in this FTDW RA to mirror the original one.

Figure 5 Huawei 4TB FTDW RA with Mirrored PCIe SSD




Table 3 Hardware Configuration of Huawei 4TB FTDW RA w/ Mirrored PCIe SSD





Internal Storage 2x 2.4TB ES3000 PCIe SSD (User Data / Mirrored)




HBA Huawei SR120





10TB PCIe SSD Based FTDW RA

To fully utilize the potential of two PCIe SSD cards, the following FTDW configuration effectively boost the Fast Track rated capacity from 4TB to 10TB while doubling the query throughput at the same time.

Figure 6 Huawei 10TB FTDW RA with Two PCIe SSD


Table 4 Hardware Configuration of Huawei 10TB FTDW RA w/ Two PCIe SSD







Internal Storage 2x 2.4TB ES3000 PCIe SSD (User Data)




HBA Huawei SR120



RAID Configuration

All the PCIe SSD based FTDW RAs share the same RAID configurations for the hard disks.

4x 300GB disks for database logs: One RAID 10 group is created and configured with a single virtual disk.

2x 600GB disks for Windows Server and SQL server: One RAID 1 group is created and configured with a single virtual disk for OS and software installation.

One additional 600GB disk is reserved as hot spare to further improve system availability.

In Huawei 4TB FTDW RA with redundant 2.4TB PCIe SSDs, the two SSDs are mirrored by Windows Server Disk Management in Server Manager.

Stripe Element Size Huawei SR120 creates RAID groups with a default stripe element size (strip size) of 64KB.



3.3 Application Configuration

The following sections explain the settings applied for the operating system and database layers for Fast Track Data Warehouse.

Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1

Enable Lock Pages in Memory: This Windows policy determines which accounts can use a process to keep data in physical memory preventing the system from paging the data to virtual memory on disk. For more information, see How to: Enable the Lock Pages in Memory Option (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=141863).

SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition

Startup Options

o -E must be added to the start-up options. This increases the number of contiguous extents in each file that are allocated to a database table as it grows. This improves sequential disk access. For more information about this option, see Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 329526 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/329526). It is important to ensure that the -E option has taken effect at database startup. The option is case-sensitive and format-sensitive. White spaces before or after the option can prevent initialization.

o -T1117 should also be added to the start-up options. This trace flag ensures even growth of all files in a file group in the case that autogrow is enabled. The standard FTDW recommendation for database file growth is to pre-allocate rather than autogrow (with the exception of TempDB).

o -T834 should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. This trace flag can improve throughput rates for many data warehousing workloads. This flag enables large page allocations in memory for the SQL Server buffer pool. For more information about this and other trace flags, see Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 920093 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920093).

Note: At this time SQL Server 2012 does not support the use of -T834 if ColumnStore indexes are in use on the database. If you plan to use ColumnStore indexes, do not use this trace flag. It was not used in the Fast Track validation testing.

SQL Server Maximum Memory: For SQL Server 2012 no more than 92 percent of total server RAM should be allocated to SQL Server. If additional applications are to share the server, the amount of RAM left available to the operating system should be adjusted



accordingly. This setting is controlled by the max server memory option. In the Fast Track validation testing, the maximum server memory was set at 92% of total server RAM.

Resource Governor: In default settings for SQL Server 2012, Resource Governor provides a maximum of 25 percent of SQL Server memory resources to each session. This setting can be used to reduce the maximum memory consumed by each query, and there is a trade-off between lowering constraints that offer higher performance for individual queries and more stringent constraints that guarantee the number of queries that can run concurrently. In the Fast Track validation testing, Resource Governor memory grant was set at 19%.

Maximum Degree of Parallelism (MaxDOP): This setting controls the number of logical cores that SQL Server uses for the parallel execution of a query. The default value of MaxDOP is 0, which dictates SQL server will dynamically allocate work up to the total number of CPU cores seen by the SQL Server service. In the Fast Track validation testing, MaxDOP was set at 8 for one-socket systems and set at 16 for two-socket systems. Also Hyper-Threading was turned on in the tests.

As with all Fast Track performance benchmarks, actual results for customers data and workload may vary. Testing at various Resource Governor and MaxDOP settings can reveal best results for specific situations.



4. Huawei FTDW RA Performance Benchmarks

The Microsoft Fast Track program offers a rigorous validation and benchmarking process that helps ensure the hardware and software components are optimized and thoroughly tested. All Huawei FTDW Reference Architectures have passed the validation and deliver high throughput performance as a result of our complete control of the entire hardware stack enabling deeper hardware and software tuning. Our 5TB SAS HDD-based FTDW reference architecture delivers maximum performance, thanks to the fast 1600MHz memory and optimized I/O configuration. The performance optimized PCIe SSD-based reference architectures potentially double the Fast Track rated throughput as compared to HDD-based configurations at the same Fast Track rated capacity.

Fast Track Data Warehouse Validation with Column Store Index (CSI)

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 features a new non-clustered indexing feature based on columnar storage technology, called xVelocity in-memory Column Store Index (CSI). It could significantly improve query performance for a wide range of queries. The FTDW validation testing is based on non-CSI enabled workloads, since FTDW systems are designed to run effectively even without columnar optimization. After a Fast Track configuration is validated, CSI will be added to the test database and the throughput performance will be recorded.

During the Fast Track validation testing, we used simulated data warehouse workloads to gauge performance of each Fast Track configuration. These tests use workloads with varying sizes ranging from 5 to 40 concurrent queries, running from 30 minutes to 1 hour each.

The following table lists the performance metrics of the Fast Track reference architectures presented in this paper.



Table 5 Huawei FTDW RA Performance Metrics

FTDW RA Model

Benchmark Logical

Scan Rate MB/s

Benchmark Physical

Scan Rate MB/s

Fast Track Rated IO

MB/s

Fast Track Rated CSI IO MB/s

Peak Scan Rate MB/s

5TB RH2288V2 w/

SAS HDD 1181 772 976.5 2766.5 1380

4TB RH2288V2 w/ 1x

PCIe SSD 1443.5 1081.5 1262.5 2714 2004

4TB RH2288V2 w/ 2x Mirrored PCIe

SSD

1498 1133 1315.5 2749 2003

10TB RH2288V2 w/ 2x

PCIe SSD 2852.5 2053 2452.75 4411 3865

In the above table,

Benchmark Logical Scan Rate measures how fast data can be read from buffer cache.

Benchmark Physical Scan Rate measures how fast data can be read from physical disks.

Fast Track Rated IO is the average of the benchmark logical and physical scan rates.

Fast Track Rated CSI IO is the average of the logical and physical scan rates when Column Store Indexing is enabled.

Peak Scan Rate is the maximum scan rate observed during testing.



Fast Track Data Warehouse Capacity Summaries

The following table lists the capacity summaries of the Fast Track reference architectures presented in this paper.

Table 6 Huawei FTDW RA Capacity Summaries

FTDW RA Model Raw Space for

User Data TempDB Space

Fast Track Rated User Data

Capacity (with Compression)

Maximum User Data Capacity

(with Compression)

5TB RH2288V2 w/

SAS HDD 2565 GB 769 GB 5 TB 6.1 TB

4TB RH2288V2 w/ 1x

PCIe SSD 2280 GB 684 GB 4 TB 5 TB

4TB RH2288V2 w/ 2x Mirrored PCIe

SSD

2280 GB 684 GB 4 TB 5 TB

10TB RH2288V2 w/ 2x

PCIe SSD 4560 GB 1048 GB 10 TB 12 TB

In the above table,

Maximum User Data Capacity is the raw data space minus the recommended space for TempDB database files, multiplied by the Fast Track compression factor, which is 3.5 for SQL Server 2012. It does not include any disk headroom that is practically required.

Fast Track Rated User Data Capacity is the optimal, Fast Track validated user data capacity. It takes into account the Fast Track Rated IO throughput, as well as the available storage capacity. The rated performance of the Fast Track system is valid when user data does not exceed this capacity.



5. Conclusion

Huawei Microsoft Fast Track Data Warehouse reference architecture aims to document a set of hardware and software optimized configurations that are tested and tuned to deliver high performance and cost effective solutions.

This document describes two classes of configurations. The cost optimized configuration based on enterprise class SAS HDDs delivers 5TB of rated data capacity at superior performance as compared to recently published alternative solutions. The performance optimized configurations based on PCIe SSD cards deliver up to double the rated capacity and more than double the rated IO throughput as compared to the SAS HDD based configuration.

Huaweis decades of experiences in designing and manufacturing mission critical Information and Communication Technology solutions allow us to offer a broad range of data warehouse solutions based on Microsoft SQL Server 2012 that are cost effective, highly available and higher in performance than alternative SMP solutions on the market.



Last Revised January 11th, 2013.

Copyright Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 2012. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written consent of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Trademark Notice HUAWEI and Huawei logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Other trademarks, product, service and company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners. General Disclaimer The information in this document may contain predictive statements including, without limitation, statements regarding the future financial and operating results, future product portfolio, new technology, etc. There are a number of factors that could cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the predictive statements. Therefore, such information is provided for reference purpose only and constitutes neither an offer nor an acceptance. Huawei may change the information at any time without notice.

HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES CO., LTD. Huawei Industrial Base Bantian Longgang Shenzhen 518129, P.R. China Tel: +86-755-28780808 enterprise.huawei.com


1. Executive summary2. Fast Track Reference Architecture Overview3. Huawei FTDW Reference Architectures3.1 Cost Optimized Configuration with SAS HDDStripe Element Size3.2 Performance Optimized Configurations with PCIe SSDStripe Element Size3.3 Application Configuration

4. Huawei FTDW RA Performance Benchmarks5. Conclusion

SQL Server 2012 Fast Track Data Warehouse for Huawei White Paper

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