#InterSystems Business Solutions and Architectures

There are many storage technologies available today from various vendors. The storage technology and configuration best for your application depends on the application access patterns and workloads.

The attached document discusses the various design considerations and recommendations for various technologies. This guide is to help you during discussions with your storage vendor to determine the appropriate storage technologies and products that will work best to meet the performance goals for your applications.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides a feature rich environment for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) as a cloud offering fully capable of supporting all of InterSystems products including the latest InterSystems IRIS Data Platform. Care must be taken, as with any platform or deployment model, to ensure all aspects of an environment are considered such as performance, availability, operations, and management procedures. Specifics of each of those areas will be covered in this article.

** 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

InterSystems and Intel recently conducted a series of benchmarks combining InterSystems IRIS with 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, also known as “Cascade Lake”, and Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent Memory (DCPMM). The goals of these benchmarks are to demonstrate the performance and scalability capabilities of InterSystems IRIS with Intel’s latest server technologies in various workload settings and server configurations. Along with various benchmark results, three different use-cases of Intel DCPMM with InterSystems IRIS are provided in this report.

Continuing on with providing some examples of various storage technologies and their performance profiles, this time we looked at the growing trend of leveraging internal commodity-based server storage, specifically the new HPE Cloudline 3150 Gen10 AMD processor-based single socket servers with two 3.2TB Samsung PM1725a NVMe drives.

It's a challenge when you need, as a software architect, design a corporate architecture to meet the current business requirements, you need achieve level 5. With InterSystems IRIS.
it's possible. With 1 product you get SQL + NoSQL + ESB + BI + Open Analytics + Real time virtual cubes + NLP + AutoML + ML (with Python) and Advanced cloud + Sharding support.

The release of IBM POWER 8 processors with AIX 7.1 introduced up to 8 SMT threads per processor core (logical or physical). Which SMT level (1, 2, 4, or 8) to use can be confusing and varies based on multiple factors. This article is meant to help with a starting point for your specific application.

Firstly, if running on a version of 2014.x or older, it is advised to use SMT 4 or lower. SMT 8 with those older versions of Cache' has shown a decline in performance and scaling in benchmarking applications.

About regulations

Personal data privacy regulations have become an indispensable requirement for projects dealing with personal data. The compliance with these laws is based on 4 principles:

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:

Hi Developers!

Thank you for using ZPM Package Manager and contributing more and more useful packages to the public registry!

But as you already aware ZPM packages are always deployed with source code.

Do you think we need to add the option to deploy without source code - e.g. if you want to deploy a commercial package?

Will you develop commercial modules if there will be an option and deploy it with ZPM?

How do you deploy commercial applications today?