The Data Warehouse's new Intel E5 V2 Processors

In a previous post I wrote about problems with the new infrastructure in the Data Warehouse, I had simply miscalculated the need for processor power. The original Intel XEON E5-2609 props were too weak. The virtual server that suffered the most was the ETL server, as you saw in the previous post the cpu consumption was high, even though we gave the ETL serve access to all four cores in the original prop the cpu consumption was a bit too high for my taste. Now we have replaced the old processor with a XEON E5-2670 v2 and gave the ETL server ten cores or threads. I think you can spot when we replaced the processor.

We could have used a somewhat simpler processor but the price difference was not big enough to consider a downgrade from XEON E5-2670 V2. The next image is the CPU utilization for the physical server hosting the ETL server. The time of replacement is equally evident here. From looking at those pictures you see a quite significant overhead for running the physical server, (I may interpret the figures wrongly).

While we replaced the processor of the physical application server, we decide to replace the processor for the database server as well. We choose a simpler six core processor XEON E5-2630 V2, which I think is perfect for the task. You see the effect of the replacement on the next image, it is as clear as the previous images.

This last replacement was not strictly necessary but the extra cost of updating this server was small. We want bios, firmware etc. to be the same version, the actual replacement was done in less than 30 minutes. But we struggled with the bios and firmware upgrade. I recommend Dell to invest in a software refresh, we actually struggled quite a lot before we had the bios and firmware updated. Otherwise these servers are great.

But what does these servers do?

For you who have missed it you can look at one day’s activity here, the video is boring I know, I been told I miss the ‘15 seconds’ generation completely. I suspect I miss everyone, but still it is a day’s night activity of the data warehouse.

p.s.

The pictures above are from Mathias Kettner's  check-MK built on top of Nagios. Really neat.