pureScale ‘lite’ – just ‘rite’ for many customers!

I recently wrote about the new Shadow tables feature in the DB2 10.5 “Cancun Release” and how it is so relevant to customers I have been working with who need to report directly on their transactional DB2 systems (see blog).

Another feature in the DB2 10.5 “Cancun Release” that I am equally excited about is to do with a new pureScale deployment option. Interestingly, this, again has significant customer relevance. A few months back, I was working on a pureScale POC with one of our customers. Availability was the primary objective for this customer and as such pureScale fitted the bill perfectly. The customer decided to use 10GE RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) as the cluster interconnect. They had just acquired new HP blade servers which already had  Broadcom RoCE adapters. So, it was game on! However, this was short lived as not far on in the installation process it became apparent that for Linux-based configurations, only Mellanox adapters are supported for pureScale. The lead time on making a decision to procure these new adapters and then to actually get them meant other things took priority for the customer and the POC was put on hold.

Now, enter the DB2 10.5 “Cancun Release” and we have a solution for the customer’s availability needs. One of the pureScale deployment options in this release is RDMA-less pureScale. What this means is that a pureScale cluster can now be set up without requiring specific InfiniBand or 10GE RoCE adapters for the cluster interconnect. TCP/IP sockets can be used instead for the cluster interconnect.  This deployment option, known as pureScale “lite” eliminates the hassle of special networking requirements and as such:

• Addresses customer needs where availability is more of a paramount SLA then enhanced performance in a production environment.
• Makes it easier for customers to deploy pureScale and evaluate the technology in test or development systems.
• Allows for pureScale to be implemented in virtualized environments, like VMware.

Of course, an RDMA-based interconnect is still going to provide the best performance and best scalability for a cluster, but for moderate workloads where high availability is the primary motivator for using pureScale, a TCP/IP based configuration might be sufficient from a performance perspective.

It is great to have another feature in the DB2 10.5 “Cancun Release” pertaining to actual customer needs. The pureScale POC for my customer is back on the table again. So watch this space. Meanwhile, get your hands dirty with pureScale “lite” in the DB2 10.5 “Cancun Release”. I’m sure you will be amazed at this excellent piece of technology for your business availability needs.

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