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Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

 
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Tony Drake_2
Frequent Advisor

oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Does anyone have some real numbers as far as the difference between performance on a PA RISC server and an Itanium server (ie anyone migrated from one to the other?)

We have some apps that are doing just that, and we need some preliminary idea of just how many Oracle instances we can stack on these consolidation servers. Since we just put in the systems, we don't really have any good benchmarks.

Thanks.
Tony
31 REPLIES 31
Alzhy
Honored Contributor

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

I am not aware of any published BMs but I suppose the disparity is wide. Look at the TPC web site.. virtually all of the top performers are no longer RISC based chips (with the exception of IBM's POWER of course) .. most are Itanium2 or Opteron.

As an FYI to everyone:

HP just announced that it will spend 3 Billion dollars in the next 3 years on Integrity Systems -- so I guess the roadmap will really be for an Itanium one.

Hakuna Matata.
A. Clay Stephenson
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Will you be running native or RA-RISC code on the Itanium boxes? If native then you don't need to have any concerns. If PA-RISC code is being executed under the ARIES emulator then you can expect about a 3X or so performance hit depending upon which Itanium and which PA-RISC boxes you are comparing. However, this is not as bad as it sounds because this only applies to the CPU portion of the execution and most database applications are I/O rather than CPU bound so that even with a 3X hit (and that value is getting better all the time) the actual execution impact may be very small --- and may even be reduced to less than zero by the overall gains in I/O.
If it ain't broke, I can fix that.
Tony Drake_2
Frequent Advisor

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

We are running Oracle 9.2.x in Native Itanium mode.

Jean-Luc Oudart
Honored Contributor

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Tony

you could check the intel site such as http://www.intel.com/products/benchmarks/server/index2.htm

but it does not say much.

I suppose the best would be to benchmark your own application on both platform.

Regards
Jean-Luc
fiat lux
Tony Drake_2
Frequent Advisor

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Thats interesting info Jean Luc.

I was hoping someone had some concrete tests that they had done already in the real world.

Geoff Wild
Honored Contributor

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Attached is the "Oracle9i migration from PA-RISC to Itanium" doc.

Some stats in there.

Rgds...Geoff
Proverbs 3:5,6 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make all your paths straight.
Geoff Wild
Honored Contributor

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

And another whitepaper "Evolving your HP-UX environments from PA-RISC to the IntelR"

Rgds...Geoff
Proverbs 3:5,6 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make all your paths straight.
Indira Aramandla
Honored Contributor

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Hi Tony,

Metalink Note:266220.1 â Migration from HP PA-RISC (64bit) to HP Itanium ia64â explains the migration steps and performance.

There is no special conversion being made when moving an Oracle database between PA-RISC and the Itanium architecture. The database structures and the database block layout are identical to PA-RISC, so when you move your PA-RISC database to the Itanium architecture, the database engine has no knowledge of the fact that it is operating on data that was created on another platform. There would be no noticeable performance benefit from going through the process of recreating your database natively on the Itanium-based system.

Attached is a document of laboratory performance comparisons Oracle 9.2 environments (PA-RISC vs.Itanium architecture).

In
Never give up, Keep Trying
Tony Drake_2
Frequent Advisor

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Let me clarify what I am asking about.

I am fully aware of the fact that the native databases and the migrated databases are similar in performance. What I want to know is what is the comparison between the database on the PA RISC vs. the database on Itanium Server.

The HP benchmarks use IBM PowerPC processors.

I know that Itanium is faster than PA_RISC.

What I want to know is how much faster.

So if I have a database query that takes 10 minutes on a PA RISC, would it take 5 minutes on an Itanium? I realize this is simplistic, but I would like to know where to set expectations.

That is the kind of thing I am looking for.

Thanks for all your posts.