STAC-M3 Benchmark Results: KX kdb+ 4.1 on 4x Dell PowerEdge R660 & 4x Dell PowerEdge R6625 servers accessing a 4-node Dell PowerScale F710 All-Flash cluster

Type: Audited

STAC recently performed a STAC-M3™ benchmark audit on a stack featuring KX’s KDB+ 4.1 database system running on eight Dell PowerEdge servers – 4x R660 Intel equipped servers and 4x R6625 AMD equipped server.  All accessing shared storage provided by a 4 node Dell Powerscale F710 All-Flash cluster

STAC-M3 is the industry standard enterprise tick-analytics benchmark for database and hardware stacks that manage large time series of market data. It provides a vendor-neutral framework for evaluating the performance, efficiency, and scalability of time-series databases used in financial analytics and backtesting.

The benchmark suite includes two sets of workloads: Antuco, the baseline suite for performance under fixed conditions, and Kanaga, an optional scaling suite that tests responsiveness and throughput at larger data volumes and user loads.

In these latest tests, the combination of Dell PowerEdge servers and PowerScale all-flash storage:

• This solution outperformed all publicly disclosed results on data transfer rates for both Antuco and Kanaga suites, including
  • 2.25x speedup compared to next best results (KDB250929)
  • 2.58x speedup compared to next best results (KDB250929)
• was faster than an earlier solution also utilising shared storage (KDB231122)
  • 12 of 17 Antuco mean-response time benchmarks
  • 24 of 24 Kanaga mean-response time benchmarks
• was faster in all metrics than the last publicly tested solution from  Dell Technologies (KDB220506)

The System Under Test included:

• Database
  • kdb+ 4.1 from KX running in distributed mode
• Database nodes
  • 4 x Dell PowerEdge R660 servers, each with:
  • 4 x Dell PowerEdge R6625 servers, each with:
• Storage:
  • 1 x 4 node Dell PowerScale F710 All-Flash Scale-Out NAS nodes