Performance Benefits of OpenVMS V8.4 Running on HP BL8x0c i2 Server Blades

In 2010 HP® introduced three new server blades and an update to OpenVMS® that will extend the life of the OpenVMS environment for many years. The BL8x0c i2 server blades use quad-core Intel® Itanium® 9300 processors. OpenVMS V8.4 offers improved performance designed for these new BL8x0c i2 server blades. This paper provides detailed analyses of the performance advantages of OpenVMS V8.4 running on BL8x0c i2 server blades. Data for this paper comes from HP and Intel product data sheets and published HP presentations that include performance test data. HP's new BL8x0c i2 server blades include many performance-enhancing features. First, the processors are quad-core with Hyper-Threading versus dual core. Second, memory is improved with 8x more memory capacity, faster DDR3 memory, and 6x the memory bandwidth versus older Integrity blades. Other performance-related improvements result in higher bandwidth between the processors and IO, and improved cache efficiency and scalability. The new server blades were tested using integer and floating point tests. Integer math provides a good indication of 'raw' CPU throughput while floating point math is a better indicator of how a CPU will perform running real-world applications. In both tests, the new servers' test scores were more than double those of older Integrity servers. Much of this is due to the new servers' quad-core processors. Other hardware enhancements further boost performance. On a per core basis, the high end Intel 9300 processor scored 15-17% higher than Intel Dual Core Itanium processors. OpenVMS V8.4 includes many performance enhancements designed for the BL8x0c i2 server blades. The following types of workloads run faster on Speed USB Boot (25%). BACKUP is also improved in OpenVMS V8.4 with support for volumes up to 2TB and the ability to generate compressed savesets. Finally, an increase in MBC count of RMS enables high IO utilization. The new server blades were compared to older Integrity servers using four specific application tests. All servers were running OpenVMS V8.4. In the Apache test, the BL860c i2 provides 95% better bandwidth and throughput than the BL860c. In the Rdb test, the BL890c i2 performed double the number of transactions per second as the rx8640. In the Java Test the maximum throughput of the BL860c i2 is up to 10.4x the AlphaServer ES45 on a per processor (socket) basis while the BL870c i2 is up to 1.8x faster than the rx6600. Finally, the BL890c i2 server blade consistently shows 3x performance advantage …