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Domino for i5/OS Value: Appendix H of eServer i5 570 R6Mail Audit Report
IBM eServer i5 is the newest member of the iSeries and AS/400 family. It's built on the latest POWER5 and advanced Virtualization technologies from IBM. Like its older siblings, IBM eServer i5 delivers outstanding scalability as a Domino server. Certainly, this scalability comes from advanced technology and powerful processors. But it also comes from the unique architectural match between Domino and i5/OS.
By implementing Domino instances in i5/OS (OS/400) subsystems, the iSeries server leverages Domino partitioning without requiring multiple copies of the operating system or multiple copies of the Domino code. For example, for this benchmark result of 165,000 Notes users, we ran 27 Domino partitions in a single copy of i5/OS utilizing 16 POWER5 processors in a single server footprint. And we delivered an average response time for those 165,000 concurrent users of 39 milliseconds (0.039 seconds) for the entire 6-hour duration of the test.
165,000 users!
That's almost unimaginable. But let's imagine it for a minute. Imagine the IBM eServer i5 server sitting in the center of a room. It's flanked by 5 double-high racks to hold the 473 disk drives required to support the mail files for the 330,000 users in the Domino Directory (name and address book). This sleek, powerful server is surrounded by 110 PC's, each simulating 1,500 users. For over 13 hours including ramp-up and steady state, these PC's bombard the eServer i5 server with e-mail requests, which it handles flawlessly:
- Delivering over 3,500,000 pieces of e-mail during the test
- Achieving a NotesMark of 242,835 transactions per minutes or 4,047 transactions per second
- Responding to every request in 0.039 seconds (on average)
Let's look at this amazing result from another perspective. Is it just a big gorilla that achieves big numbers because of sheer size? Actually, eServer i5 achieves excellent efficiency of resource utilization for configurations of different shapes and sizes.
The 16-way POWER5 configuration for this audit supported 10,312 users per processor. Earlier this year, we published a 24,000 R6Notes report on a 2-way IBM eServer i5, supporting 12,000 users per processor. These two results demonstrate near-linear scalability on POWER5 and i5/OS as we add processors to the same operating system and the same Domino instance. And both of these iSeries audits show a much better users-per-processor ratio compared to published results for other platforms, even better than previous results with POWER4 technology.
We see similar efficiency in the user-per-MHz ratio compared to other processors architectures. These technology achievements are interesting -- even exciting. But what does it mean to real organizations who don't have 165,000 employees and don't try to eke out every last ounce of performance from their systems? The answer comes back to the match between eServer i5 architecture and Domino architecture. Organizations of all shapes and sizes can benefit from the ability to fully leverage Domino partitioning. It translates to fewer moving parts to pay for and to manage: physical servers, operating systems, Domino code. It means you can often add a new group of users or a new Domino application simply by creating another instance of Domino in a few minutes, instead of deploying another physical server with everything that implies. It means your administrators can spend their time delivering end user support and business value instead of managing a server farm.
This benchmark result is the latest example of IBM's commitment to the continued excellence of the iSeries family as a Domino server platform. Thanks for taking the time to read about it. If you'd like to learn more, please browse the other links on this Web site.
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