Martin Widlake's Yet Another Oracle Blog

Will the Single Box System make a Comeback? December 8, 2011

For about 12 months now I’ve been saying to people(*) that I think the single box server is going to make a comeback and nearly all businesses won’t need the awful complexity that comes with the current clustered/exadata/RAC/SAN solutions.

Now, this blog post is more a line-in-the-sand and not a well researched or even thought out white paper – so forgive me the obvious mistakes that everyone makes when they make a first draft of their argument and before they check their basic facts, it’s the principle that I want to lay down.

I think we should be able to build incredible powerful machines based on PC-type components, machines capable of satisfying the database server requirements of anything but the most demanding or unusual business systems. And possibly even them. Heck, I’ve helped build a few pretty serious systems where the CPU, memory and inter-box communication is PC-like already. If you take the storage component out of needing to be centralise (and this shared), I think that is a major change is just over the horizon.

At one of his talks at the UKOUG conference this year, Julian Dyke showed a few tables of CPU performance, based on a very simple PL/SQL loop test he has been using for a couple of years now. The current winner is 8 seconds by a… Core i7 2600K. ie a PC chip and one that is popular with gamers. It has 4 cores and runs two threads per core, at 3.4GHz and can boost a single core to 3.8 GHz. These modern chips are very powerful. However, chips are no longer getting faster so much as wider – more cores. More ability to do lots of the same thing at the same speed.

Memory prices continue to tumble, especially with smart devices and SSD demands pushing up the production of memory of all types. Memory has fairly low energy demands so you can shove a lot of it in one box.

Another bit of key hardware for gamers is the graphics card – if you buy a top-of-the-range graphics card for a PC that is a couple of years old, the graphics card probably has more pure compute grunt than your CPU and a massive amount of data is pushed too and fro across the PCIe interface. I was saying something about this to some friends a couple of days ago but James Morle brought it back to mind when he tweeted about this attempt at a standard about using PCI-e for SSD. A PCI-e 16X interface has a theoretical throughput of 4000MB per second – each way. This compares to 600MB for SATA III, which is enough for a modern SSD. A single modern SSD. {what I am not aware of is the latency for PCI-e but I’d be surprised if it was not pretty low}. I think you can see where I am going here.

Gamers and image editors have probably been most responsible for pushing along this increase in performance and intra-system communication.

SSD storage is being produced in packages with a form factor and interface to enable an easy swap into the place of spinning rust, with for example a SATA3 interface and 3.5inch hard disk chassis shape. There is no reason that SSD (or other memory-based) storage cannot be manufactured in all sorts of different form factors, there is no physical constraint of having to house a spinning disc. Density per dollar of course keeps heading towards the basement. TB units will soon be here but maybe we need cheap 256GB units more than anything. So, storage is going to be compact and able to be in form factors like long, thin slabs or even odd shapes.

So when will we start to see cheap machines something like this: Four sockets for 8/16/32 core CPUs, 128GB main memory (which will soon be pretty standard for servers), memory-based storage units that clip to the external housing (to provide all the heat loss they require) that combine many chips to give 1Gb IO rates, interfaced via the PCIe 16X or 32X interface. You don’t need a HBA, your storage is internal. You will have multipath 10GbE going in and out of the box to allow for normal network connectivity and backup, plus remote access of local files if need be.

That should be enough CPU, memory and IO capacity for most business systems {though some quote from the 1960′s about how many companies could possible need a computer spring to mind}. You don’t need shared storage for this, in fact I am of the opinion that shared storage is a royal pain in the behind as you are constantly having to deal with the complexity of shared access and maximising contention on the flimsy excuse of “sweating your assets”. And paying for the benefit of that overly complex, shared, contended solution.

You don’t need a cluster as you have all the cpu, working memory and storage you need in a 1U server. “What about resilience, what if you have a failure?”. Well, I am swapping back my opinion on RAC to where I was in 2002 – it is so damned complex it causes way more outage than it saves. Especially when it comes to upgrades. Talking to my fellow DBA-types, the pain of migration and the number of bugs that come and go from version to version, mix of CRS, RDBMS and ASM versions, that is taking up massive amounts of their time. Dataguard is way simpler and I am willing to bet that for 99.9% of businesses other IT factors cause costly system outages an order of magnitude more times than the difference between what a good MAA dataguard solution can provide you compared to a good stretched RAC one can.

I think we are already almost at the point where most “big” systems that use SAN or similar storage don’t need to be big. If you need hundreds of systems, you can virtualize them onto a small number of “everything local”
boxes.

A reason I can see it not happening is cost. The solution would just be too cheap, hardware suppliers will resist it because, hell, how can you charge hundreds of thousands of USD for what is in effect a PC on steroids? But desktop games machines will soon have everything 99% of business systems need except component redundancy and, if your backups are on fast SSD and you a way simpler Active/Passive/MAA dataguard type configuration (or the equivalent for your RDBMS technology) rather than RAC and clustering, you don’t need that total redundancy. Dual power supply and a spare chunk of solid-state you can swap in for a failed raid 10 element is enough.