- 35 Million messages per second using 29West IPC
- 89% cost reduction over current-generation servers
Last week, 29West had a couple of engineers in downtown Chicago, working with a good customer of ours on a new multi-core server they have, doing scaling tests with our streaming messaging product, LBM. This happens all the time; the more interesting part is that the box is a 4-socket Boxboro server, using Intel’s soon-to-be-released Nehalem-EX 8-core CPUs. That’s 32 cores, with the ability to run an additional 32 Hyperthreads; for a total of 64 simultaneous threads on a single machine. Needless to say, this customer was very interested in seeing what real-world system consolidation savings and performance gains they could realize with a machine like this – the kind that we’ve been talking about as imminent for several years now.
What we found was very exciting. We were able to deliver 35 Million 100-byte messages per second between 32 publishing processes and 32 receiving processes using LBM’s IPC transport. After reviewing these numbers, our Chicago customer reported they will be able to use this single 4U machine (which they quoted as costing them $20,000, obviously there is no official pricing yet, as the CPUs have yet to be officially released) to replace an entire rack of hardware, normally costing $180,000. This is the kind of immense cost savings with server consolidation that the industry has been talking about for years: 89% cost reduction with no performance penalty, in this case.
Intel and AMD agree that future CPU scaling will go out, not up. While clock cycles seem to have plateaued around 3 Gigahertz, and five years ago we were all excited about dual-core machines, the major commodity CPU manufacturers are now cranking out 4-core CPUs every day, with 6 and 8-core processors (like the Nehalem-EX chips we tested last week) coming very soon.
29West is extremely excited to work with our customers to best deploy our next-generation messaging inside these new densely multi-core systems, and integrating them into larger deployments using our full range of message delivery (streaming, persistent and queued) and connectivity features (global WAN routing, multi-hop forwarding, desktop distribution).
Tags: IPC, LBM, Multi-Core, Nehalem, Boxboro, Server Consolidation
