I mentioned earlier this week that IBM has published scale-out numbers for DB2 pureScale. I thought I’d take a few minutes to let you know about those numbers. To measure the efficiency of scaling out a system, IBM successively added DB2 servers to form larger and larger clusters. A workload that is representative of a Web commerce application (90% read and 10% write) was used. Unlike many Oracle RAC benchmarks, the IBM lab tests did not require any cluster awareness (i.e. transactions were completely random, with no need for transaction routing to specific nodes). The diagram below shows the results. Up to 64 nodes in the cluster, the scalability (compared to the 1 member result) is above 95% and at 128 nodes the scalability is at 84%.

By the way, if you want to see how easy it is to add or remove nodes in the cluster, look at the following video. Please remember that the DB2 pureScale approach does not require any re-partitioning of data, either manual or automated, when nodes are added or removed. This is because DB2 pureScale is based on the approach that has been successfully running on the mainframe for decades, which takes advantage of centralized locking to provide the ultimate database scale-out efficiency.