Comments on: PDW Architecture: The Data Rack

By: Parallel Data Warehousing (PDW) Explained | James Serra's Blog

Parallel Data Warehousing (PDW) Explained | James Serra's Blog — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 02:49:38 +0000

[...] Here is the layout of the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance (full specs here with review and architecture overview and performance guide). The architecture is hub-and-spoke and supports up to 40 servers, made up of a control rack and a data rack: [...]

By: Brian Mitchell

Brian Mitchell — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 13:55:46 +0000

Unfortunately, the answers to your questions are not so easily answered. The reason for this is that PDW is a reference architecture. Thus, Microsoft works with each vendor to come up with multiple hardware versions of the architecture that differ depending on what the customer is trying to do. For example, do you have 20 TB of data that you want to have incredible query response times or are you happy to just get it all on a system that you can query at responsible times. For the first you might have a two data rack system with quick relatively small drives and for the second you may have a single data rack system with 1 TB drives on the storage nodes. Thus, I believe that there will be several appliances types to choose from with each vendor plus the ability to add data racks as necessary. Also, hardware changes and the reference architecture’s will continually be updated.

To try and answer your questions a bit more directly, an example of one of the current reference architecture’s for HP will be that a control node is a DL380 G7 with 6 core 3.33 GHz processors. Compute nodes would be 6 core 2.93 GHz processors with 96 GB of Memory. Disks on a compute nodes include both internal and external disks. Internally, you would have eight disks per compute node. Currently their configuration would be 300 GB 10K RPM disks. Externally, they would have 10 disks plus one hot spare for each compute node. This is where you could choose to use 1 TB 7200 RPM disks or something smaller and faster like 300 GB 15K disks depending our your needs. Feel free to contact me and I’ll try and get you in touch with the right people at Microsoft/HP so that you can get all the answers to any questions you have about PDW’s configuration.

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 18:59:32 +0000

Great article. I am struggling to get specifics on the HP hardware configuration for the PDW. I cannot seem to find a document or web page that tells me very specifically what the options are for the Data Rack. I did see some presentations from Tech Ed but they were from June and I would love to see an official/definitive document from either HP or Microsoft that tells me:

1: what types of servers/processors are used for the Control Node
2: same question for compute node although I have seen a mention of 2X6core Westmere chips but no mention of memory capacity.
3: How about storage on the Storage Node, how many disks in each node, what is the capacity of each drive and speed etc.

Why is this so hard to find?