Dave Beulke

This week IBM announced DB2’s newest feature, DB2 pureScale.  This new feature within the DB2 Family of products represents the next step in overall database performance because of its unlimited capacity, application transparency and continuous availability.  The DB2 pureScale feature provides the ability to balance the workload across a dynamic number of DB2 servers that share a common set of disks while managing all the database concurrency issues.

Currently, DB2 pureScale is implemented across DB2 cluster service nodes running on the IBM Power Servers leveraging InfiniBand network connectivity using the Tivoli System Automation.  DB2 pureScale will be available first on the IBM Power Servers and then rolled out to other configurations in the future.  Through these facilities, the DB2 pureScale feature is able to dynamically add new server capacity transparently for any application.  This provides continuous availability and instantaneous scalability capabilities for all applications.

By being able to grow or shrink your DB2 cluster servers on demand, your business can provide resources where they are needed and only when they are needed.  DB2 pureScale provides the ability and flexibility to deploy DB2 resources for days or weeks and only pay for the software stack when those resources are in use.  This technology flexibility limits the business cost by only paying for the resources for this short period of time when they are in use.  This can dramatically reduce overall hardware and software costs for any business and especially for businesses that have seasonal or fluctuating workload demands.

IBM’s testing of the DB2 pureScale feature shows tremendous scalability as the number of DB2 servers are increased for the workload.  By balancing the workload across the DB2 database servers the configuration retains 95% of its scalability through 32 server nodes and 81% scalability up to 112 DB2 server nodes.  All of this capacity with application transparency and automatic fail over provide a tremendous computing power for any application requirements.

This DB2 pureScale feature leverages unique optimization of the global locking and caching coherency interfaces of the DB2 cluster nodes through DB2 Cluster Services.  These Cluster Services provide centralized and duplexed mechanisms, like a DB2 for z/OS data sharing coupling facility, for managing the global locking and caching needs of the entire cluster application workload.   The centralization of the Cluster Services provides many advantages over other clustering technologies, like Oracle RAC, by minimizing the lock and cache communication to multiple servers.  This is another reason DB2 continues to lead the industry in innovation, performance, scalability and continuous availability.

For more information go to the IBM DB2 pureScale web site at
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/9/editions-features-purescale.html
or the DB2 pureScale press release can be found at
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/28593.wss

Are you going to the IOD conference in Las Vegas? Come to my session Monday October 26th 2:45-3:45 #1392 Java DB2 Performance with Optim Data Studio and pureQuery in the Mandalay Bay North Convention Center, in the South Pacific room.