Scale-out approach, in contrast to scale-up approach (exploring increasing performance by utilizing more powerful shared-memory servers), refers to deployment of applications on a large number of small, inexpensive, but tightly packaged and tightly interconnected servers. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in scale-out approach. The purpose of this study is to discover advantages or disadvantages of scale-out systems with a typical enterprise workload, IBM Trade Performance Benchmark Sample for WebSphere Application Server (a.k.a. Trade6). In this work, through cross system performance comparison, we show that for such workload, scale-out approach has better performance/cost effect. In term of scalability, we show that WebSphere Application Server packages for distributed environment scale well while the possible bottleneck of the application deployment is the database tier. We present preliminary results to show that both database partitioning feature (DPF) and federated...
Hao Yu, José E. Moreira, Parijat Dube, I-Hs