#InterSystems Business Solutions and Architectures

** Revised Feb-12, 2018

While this article is about InterSystems IRIS, it also applies to Caché, Ensemble, and HealthShare distributions.

Introduction

Memory is managed in pages. The default page size is 4KB on Linux systems. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, and Oracle Linux 6 introduced a method to provide an increased page size in 2MB or 1GB sizes depending on system configuration know as HugePages.

At first HugePages required to be assigned at boot time, and if not managed or calculated appropriately could result in wasted resources. As a result various Linux distributions introduced Transparent HugePages with the 2.6.38 kernel as enabled by default. This was meant as a means to automate creating, managing, and using HugePages. Prior kernel versions may have this feature as well however may not be marked as [always] and potentially set to [madvise].

Transparent Huge Pages (THP) is a Linux memory management system that reduces the overhead of Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) lookups on machines with large amounts of memory by using larger memory pages. However in current Linux releases THP can only map individual process heap and stack space.

A request came from a customer to estimate how long it would take to encrypt a database with cvencrypt utility.

This question is a little bit like how long is a piece of string — it depends. But its an interesting question. The answer primarily depends on the performance of CPU and storage on the target platform the customer is using, so the answer is more about coming up with a simple methodology that can be used to benchmark the CPU and storage while running cvencrypt.

During recent large scale benchmarking activities, we were seeing excessive %sys CPU time that negatively impacted scaling of the application.

Problem

I am often asked by customers, vendors or internal teams to explain CPU capacity planning for large production databases running on VMware vSphere.

In summary there are a few simple best practices to follow for sizing CPU for large production databases:

• Plan for one vCPU per physical CPU core.
• Consider NUMA and ideally size VMs to keep CPU and memory local to a NUMA node.
• Right-size virtual machines. Add vCPUs only when needed.

Generally this leads to a couple of common questions:

What is Data Fabric?

This is the first article from a series. I will provide details, using bpmn notation, how can I do to develop, deploy, secure, operate a consume IRIS digital services, linking with IRIS documentation. Each subprocess will be described with an individual bpmn diagram. This is the macroprocess.

Documentation links:

The TOGAF is the The Open Group Architecture Framework. It provides an approach for planning, design, implement, deploy and govern your EA (Enterprise Architecture) projects.

The TOGAF has a concept called Building Block. It is any element that can be used, reused a executed to deliver value and new functions to the business.

In the picture above, I present to you the main IRIS building blocks to create fantastic apps.

I'm glad to announce we have recently released our second Starter Pack. This one is for the Mining Industry, and the first was for Industrial IoT (OEE).

But what does it exactly mean?

InterSystems IRIS Starter Packs (thanks to Joe Lichtenberg that helped with this text)

Hi community,

When InterSystems Health stack are working toghether the hospital ecosystem get this:

Often InterSystems technology architect team is asked about recommended storage arrays or storage technologies. To provide this information to a wider audience as reference, a new series is started to provide some of the results we have encountered with various storage technologies. As a general recommendation, all-flash storage is highly recommended with all InterSystems products to provide the lowest latency and predictable IOPS capabilities.

The first in the series was the most recently tested Netapp AFF A300 storage array. This is middle-tier type storage array with several higher models above it. This specific A300 model is capable of supporting a minimal configuration of only a few drives to hundreds of drives per HA pair, and also capable of being clustered with multiple controller pairs for tens of PB's of disk capacity and hundreds of thousands of IOPS or higher.

The InterSystems IRIS has functions that allows create DIWK digital services. A few products have the ability to transform data into wisdom, according to the following pyramid.