Article Murray Oldfield · Nov 25, 2016 23m read InterSystems Data Platforms and performance – Part 8 Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Capacity and Performance Planning Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions have been gaining traction for the last few years with the number of deployments now increasing rapidly. IT decision makers are considering HCI when scoping new deployments or hardware refreshes especially for applications already virtualised on VMware. Reasons for choosing HCI include; dealing with a single vendor, validated interoperability between all hardware and software components, high performance especially IO, simple scalability by addition of hosts, simplified deployment and simplified management. #Best Practices #InterSystems Business Solutions and Architectures #Performance #System Administration #Caché #InterSystems IRIS 9 7 1 3.5K
Article Murray Oldfield · Nov 12, 2016 5m read InterSystems Data Platforms Capacity Planning and Performance Series Index Index This is a list of all the posts in the Data Platforms’ capacity planning and performance series in order. Also a general list of my other posts. I will update as new posts in the series are added. You will notice that I wrote some posts before IRIS was released and refer to Caché. I will revisit the posts over time, but in the meantime, Generally, the advice for configuration is the same for Caché and IRIS. Some command names may have changed; the most obvious example is that anywhere you see the ^pButtons command, you can replace it with ^SystemPerformance. While some posts are updated to preserve links, others will be marked as strikethrough to indicate that the post is legacy. Generally, I will say, "See: some other post" if it is appropriate. Capacity Planning and Performance Series Generally, posts build on previous ones, but you can also just dive into subjects that look interesting. Part 1 - Getting started on the Journey, collecting metrics. Part 2 - Looking at the metrics we collected. Part 3 - Focus on CPU. Part 4 - Looking at memory. Part 5 - Monitoring with SNMP. Part 6 - Caché storage IO profile. Part 7 - ECP for performance, scalability and availability. Part 8 - Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Capacity and Performance Planning Part 9 - Caché VMware Best Practice Guide Part 10 - VM Backups and IRIS freeze/thaw scripts Part 11 - Virtualizing large databases - VMware cpu capacity planning #Best Practices #InterSystems Business Solutions and Architectures #System Administration #Tips & Tricks #Caché #InterSystems IRIS #InterSystems IRIS for Health 14 0 5 5.9K
Article Murray Oldfield · Oct 3, 2016 4m read Markdown workflow for creating Community posts Here in Community I use the WYSIWYG Text format control to answer questions and other quick text entries. But for longer posts when I want formatting or if I am building incrementally over several days I use the Plain text (supports markdown) control because it's quicker and easier to post an article I have written offline. In this post I share my workflow and a set of tools to publish long read posts. #DC Feedback 6 8 0 735
Article Murray Oldfield · Oct 1, 2016 10m read Data Platforms and Performance - Part 7 ECP for performance, scalability and availability One of the great availability and scaling features of Caché is Enterprise Cache Protocol (ECP). With consideration during application development distributed processing using ECP allows a scale out architecture for Caché applications. Application processing can scale to very high rates from a single application server to the processing power of up to 255 application servers with no application changes. #Best Practices #ECP #InterSystems Business Solutions and Architectures #System Administration #Caché #InterSystems IRIS #InterSystems IRIS for Health 9 6 2 3.1K
Article Murray Oldfield · Sep 30, 2016 1m read ECP Magic I saw someone recently refer to ECP as magic. It certainly seems so, and there is a lot of very clever engineering to make it work. But the following sequence of diagrams is a simple view of how data is retrieved and used across a distributed architecture. For more more on ECP including capacity planning follow this link: Data Platforms and Performance - Part 7 ECP for performance, scalability and availability #Best Practices #ECP #InterSystems Business Solutions and Architectures #InterSystems IRIS 10 0 0 1.2K
Article Murray Oldfield · Jun 17, 2016 2m read Data Platforms and Performance - Part 6 Caché Storage IO Profile Myself and the other Technology Architects often have to explain to customers and vendors Caché IO requirements and the way that Caché applications will use storage systems. The following tables are useful when explaining typical Caché IO profile and requirements for a transactional database application with customers and vendors. The original tables were created by Mark Bolinsky. In future posts I will be discussing more about storage IO so am also posting these tables now as a reference for those articles. #Best Practices #InterSystems Business Solutions and Architectures #Performance #System Administration #Caché #InterSystems IRIS #InterSystems IRIS for Health 9 7 2 2.8K
Article Murray Oldfield · May 26, 2016 1m read Windows, Caché and virus scanners I have seen a customer problem recently where the use of a virus scanner running over Caché databases was causing intermittent application slow downs and bad user response times. This is a surprisingly common problem, so this short post is just a reminder to exclude key Caché components from your virus scanning. Generally virus scanning must exclude the CACHE.DAT database files and Caché binaries. If an anti-virus is scanning CACHE.DATs and InterSystems files then system performance will be significantly impacted. #System Administration #Caché 3 2 1 1.6K
Article Murray Oldfield · Apr 27, 2016 11m read InterSystems Data Platforms and performance - Part 5 Monitoring with SNMP InterSystems Data Platforms and performance - Part 5 Monitoring with SNMP #Best Practices #InterSystems Business Solutions and Architectures #Monitoring #Performance #System Administration #Caché #InterSystems IRIS #InterSystems IRIS for Health 13 8 2 4.2K
Article Murray Oldfield · Apr 8, 2016 17m read InterSystems Data Platforms and Performance Part 4 - Looking at Memory This post will guide you through the process of sizing shared memory requirements for database applications running on InterSystems data platforms. It will cover key aspects such as global and routine buffers, gmheap, and locksize, providing you with a comprehensive understanding. Additionally, it will offer performance tips for configuring servers and virtualizing IRIS applications. Please note that when I refer to IRIS, I include all the data platforms (Ensemble, HealthShare, iKnow, Caché, and IRIS). #Best Practices #InterSystems Business Solutions and Architectures #Performance #System Administration #Caché #InterSystems IRIS #InterSystems IRIS for Health 29 3 7 10.3K
Article Murray Oldfield · Apr 7, 2016 1m read Global Summit 2016 - Using Systems Metrics for Capacity Planning Presenter: Murray OldfieldTask: Avoid bottlenecks caused by scaling up, before they become a problemApproach: Discuss what operating system and InterSystems metrics you should look at and how to interpret them Systems behave differently when database activity scales up. In the worst case, bottlenecks appear and users are impacted. This session shows you which operating system and InterSystems metrics you should be looking at and how to interpret them so you can head off bottlenecks before they impact users. This sessions also shows strategies for planning infrastructure taking into consideration InterSystems' data platforms requirements.Content related to this session, including slides, video and additional learning content can be found here. #System Administration #Caché 0 0 0 354
Article Murray Oldfield · Apr 7, 2016 1m read Global Summit 2016 - Tier 1 Applications in a Virtual Environment Presenter: Murray OldfieldTask: Deploy applications based on InterSystems’ technology using VMware.Approach: Provide a checklist of factors to consider, particularly when deploying a production database application that requires high availability Are you ready to deploy your applications on a virtualized architecture? This talk will highlight what you need to plan and do when deploying applications built on ISC data platforms using VMware. Special focus on what you need to know when planning for highly available (HA) production database applications.Content related to this session, including slides, video and additional learning content can be found here. #High Availability #Caché 0 0 0 358
Article Murray Oldfield · Apr 1, 2016 2m read InterSystems Data Platforms and performance – how to update pButtons. Previously I showed you how to run pButtons to start collecting performance metrics that we are looking at in this series of posts. #Best Practices #InterSystems Business Solutions and Architectures #Performance #System Administration #Caché #InterSystems IRIS 3 2 0 1.6K
Article Murray Oldfield · Apr 1, 2016 3m read Extracting pButtons data to a csv file for easy charting A short post for now to answer a question that came up. In post two of this series I included graphs of performance data extracted from pButtons. I was asked off-line if there is a quicker way than cut/paste to extract metrics for mgstat etc from a pButtons .html file for easy charting in Excel. See: - Part 2 - Looking at the metrics we collected #Best Practices #CSV #Performance #System Administration #InterSystems IRIS 7 2 0 1.5K
Article Murray Oldfield · Mar 25, 2016 14m read InterSystems Data Platforms and performance – Part 3: Focus on CPU This week I am going to look at CPU, one of the primary hardware food groups :) A customer asked me to advise on the following scenario; Their production servers are approaching end of life and its time for a hardware refresh. They are also thinking of consolidating servers by virtualising and want to right-size capacity either bare-metal or virtualized. Today we will look at CPU, in later posts I will explain the approach for right-sizing other key food groups - memory and IO. So the questions are: #Best Practices #InterSystems Business Solutions and Architectures #Performance #System Administration #Caché #InterSystems IRIS #InterSystems IRIS for Health 14 10 2 4.9K
Article Murray Oldfield · Mar 11, 2016 8m read InterSystems Data Platforms and performance – Part 2 In the last post we scheduled 24-hour collections of performance metrics using pButtons. In this post we are going to be looking at a few of the key metrics that are being collected and how they relate to the underlying system hardware. We will also start to explore the relationship between Caché (or any of the InterSystems Data Platforms) metrics and system metrics. And how you can use these metrics to understand the daily beat rate of your systems and diagnose performance problems. #Best Practices #InterSystems Business Solutions and Architectures #Performance #System Administration #Caché #InterSystems IRIS #InterSystems IRIS for Health 19 10 2 3.9K
Article Murray Oldfield · Mar 8, 2016 8m read InterSystems Data Platforms and performance – Part 1 Your application is deployed and everything is running fine. Great, hi-five! Then out of the blue the phone starts to ring off the hook – it’s users complaining that the application is sometimes ‘slow’. But what does that mean? Sometimes? What tools do you have and what statistics should you be looking at to find and resolve this slowness? Is your system infrastructure up to the task of the user load? What infrastructure design questions should you have asked before you went into production? How can you capacity plan for new hardware with confidence and without over-spec'ing? How can you stop the phone ringing? How could you have stopped it ringing in the first place? #Best Practices #InterSystems Business Solutions and Architectures #Performance #System Administration #Caché #InterSystems IRIS #InterSystems IRIS for Health 23 13 5 4.4K
Article Murray Oldfield · Feb 26, 2016 13m read Provision a Caché application using Ansible - Part 1 Ansible helped me solve the problem of quickly deploying Caché and application components for Data Platforms benchmarks. You can use the same tools and methodology for standing up your test labs, training systems, development or other environments. If you deploy applications at customer sites you could automate much of the deployment and ensure that system, Caché and your application are configured to your applications best practice standards. #Best Practices #Open Source #System Administration #Caché 13 4 0 2.5K